Cinderella's Song
by Kira Sharp
Summary: Two PPC agents are sent to investigate a travesty of Deep Space Nine fan fiction, but discover that righting the continuum may be more challenging than it appears.
1. Foreword

**Foreword: A Few Words About Mary Sue and the PPC**

Meta meta meta meta _swing meta-meta-meta!_

Welcome to the world of meta-fanfiction, fanfiction about other people's fanfiction. _Cinderella's Song_ is a PPC story, written after the fashion of the original Jay and Acacia (Protectors of the Plot Continuum, licensed Mary Sue Assassins) and Miss Camilla Sandman (headmistress of the Official Fanfiction University). Both the University and the PPC work to curb the flow of noxious badfic in paper and cyberspace. The University attempts this by forcibly reeducating authors in the way of grammar and characterization; the noble agents of the PPC step into the storyline itself to purge the continuum of badly written characters, hookups, and misinformation. The best known branch of the PPC is the Department of Mary Sues, whose trained assassins are ready to shoot these superpowered self-insertion characters on sight and rescue lovesick canon characters from their sticky hands.

This story assumes foreknowledge of the PPC and Mary Sue. If you are want more information, the original adventures and links to later instantiations can be found at _Miss Sandman's World of Dreams_. Other good resources on Mary Sue include _Dr. Merlin's Guide to Fanfiction_ and her classic _Mary Sue Litmus Test_. Short Mary Sue humor pieces include the classic _Nine Men and a Little Lady_ and Pirate Monkey's Hogwarts comic _Sparklypoo_. The brilliant unfinished saga _Suedom_, is also worth a read, as our agents will eventually find their way into that story. All of these pieces can be easily googled online.

Now, read. 


	2. Prologue

**Prologue**

_Once upon a time there was a king  
Who was tired of being alone.  
He searched and searched for a bride  
But in the end found only three._

_Whom did he choose?  
Not the most beautiful or splendid,  
But her with goodness and innocence._

_La, la, la, la la.  
La, la, la, la la._

Stepsister: Are you still singing that tired old thing? Give it a rest already!

Cinderella: Let me sing beside the fire… _Once—_

Stepsisters: And twice! And three times!

--Cinderella's Song, Rossini's _La Cenerentola_


	3. Chapter 1

Dr. Bashir opened his eyes cautiously. He had been involved in enough espionage since the Dominion threat first loomed--spent enough time in a Dominion gulag, for that matter--to have an instinctive sense of when he was not waking up in his own bed. Taken. Again.

He massaged his temples and tried to remember the events of last night. An attack? An ill-advised journey? Was there a mysterious stranger in Quark's who...

Blank. A total blank.

He didn't feel drugged or concussed or roughed up. He didn't even feel hung over. A vague feeling in his stomach, like he'd eaten dinner after falling asleep, like time gone wrong. But no shred of recollection as to where he was or how he got here.

Bashir inspected his prison cell. Comfortable, at least by wartime standards. The bed was a double and was provided with all sorts of bedding, some of which he might be able to use to overpower somebody. He thought better of that plan at once. Even if he could pass the force field, the throbbing deckplates let him know he was onboard ship. No coordinates, no communications, no navigation... where was he to run to?

He inspected the guards stationed outside. Four of them, humanoid women by the looks of them, all in identical black uniforms he didn't recognize. But no Jem'Hadar. No Vorta. No Cardassians, no Maquis, nothing from either side of the demilitarized zone. Bashir's heart rate slowed down. Perhaps he might get out of this alive.

Two of the guards were eyeing him with interest. They did not, interestingly enough appear to be holding any sort of weapons, but that didn't mean anything. He swung his legs out of bed and approached the force field cautiously. He wondered if the guards were Zen'Kethi and tried to remember if he had ever seen a Zen'Kethi insignia. The force field sizzled at his touch. It apparently extended further back than he had thought.

"You von't get hurt, but it von't do you any good, either," said one of the guards kindly. Her accent was heavy, but Bashir's guess was that she was of Earth origin. And she was right. The force field did not hurt.

Now that he was standing at the barrier, all four guards were studying him with open curiosity. Two of them had even drifted away from their posts to look him over. That seemed like some sort of dereliction of duty, didn't it? Taking advantage of the lack of menace and the frank interest of his lady captors, Bashir put on his most charming smile and decided to try for a bit of information.

"Well," he began, somewhat unsteadily. "You certainly have me at a disadvantage. Might I ask where we are?"

"We're aboard the Night Ship," said a guard. That meant nothing to him. If it weren't for the absence of insignia, he might have suspected that he was in the hands of his own people, some Federation intelligence team working up another hare-brained scheme to detect changeling spies.

"Why have I been brought here?" Julian tried again.

"Special assignation," said the guard, and Bashir could hear the smile in her voice. "Your presence was greatly desired by many people." Some of the other guards giggled and again, Bashir was struck by the unprofessional behavior.

"Who wants me?" pressed Julian, and at this, the entire corridor rang with laughter. The answer was not at all reassuring.

"Everyone!"


	4. Chapter 2

"Excuse me?" repeated Blythe. "License to what?"

The rose looked somewhat wilted. "As you well know, Agent Grimm, we are severely taxed right now in the Department of Mary Sues, and the Hippie Sequoia tells me we have lost three agents over in the Star Trek branch. I need to be honest with you: you're a good intelligence agent, and we want you to know how much we value your work. But if you submit your report to the Department of Mary Sues now, it's going to go straight into the backlog of unpurged badfic and no one's going to review it for the next few weeks at least. I just don't want to see your and Agent Reese's work lying idle while we wait for a free assassin. You're perfectly qualified."

Blythe looked worried. "But I'm not actually a member of the Department of Mary Sues. I've never actually assassinated anything except via a dirty glare. And Bianca transferred out of that field because she got squicked. I'm not sure how keen she is to go back."

Sub Rosa waved its petals reassuringly. "You won't be required to assassinate anything if you don't feel that the charges justify it," it assured her. "But I'm told that this particular story is quite an open-and-shut case. If, after you've assembled your charge sheet, you feel that any or all of the Mary Sues need to be hauled out and shot, the Sunflower has given you dispensation to do the job yourself. And if not, we will send an assassin out as soon as one becomes available."

Blythe's face cleared. After all, this was Star Trek, where assassinating someone could be done neatly with a phaser and did not require the kind of creative body disposal that the Sherlock Holmes or Lord of the Rings agents had to deal with. And if the story was truly that horrendous...

"Wait a minute! What do you mean, ANY or ALL of the Mary Sues?" 


	5. Chapter 3

Blythe waved the printout with an almost vicious enthusiasm. No, call a spade a spade: it was quite vicious.

"Entirely your cup of tea," she said, waving it two inches from Bianca's nose. "Trek: DS9, OFCs with a lust-on for Julian, flying around in a big, happy spaceship. We assemble charges, and then the Sunflower says we're allowed to vaporize them."

Bianca looked sincerely horrified, which only made Blythe smile wider. No one could fake sincerity as well as Bianca. "Julian? My Julian? No, you wicked lustbunny Sues, leave him be, he's mine alone!" She snatched a page at random and scanned the highlighted sections. "Yee-gad! 400 fangirls in this one?"

"Only one author, thankfully," Blythe grinned. "Some psychokitty514." She put on her best Reading Voice and declaimed a sample page.

_Bashir perked up. After all, a pretty girl wanted to  
spend time with him, would it be gentlemanly to  
send her away. 'Sit down, please,' he told her,  
graciously. 'Can I get you anything?'_

_The woman laughed, making her cleavage shake.  
'I've got all that I want right here,' she told him,  
staring at him fixedly."_

Bianca rolled her eyes. "Just wait," Blythe teased, "then she feeds him grapes and tells him about her family. And that's all before we get to the kissing bit."

"Kiss me, Julian!" Bianca mimicked. "I am a... desparate!bored!virgin! with no creativity or intelligence!"

"Really," agreed Blythe. "And no sense of plot, either, I might add. Oh, no! He's getting away! Run, Sues, run!"

"Just when I thought all the stupid Deep Space Nine fic had been written and done with," sighed Blythe. "Ah well."

Blythe handed Bianca her equipment. "Pick an outfit," she told her. "We need to look inconspicuous. They're not on a Federation ship and they're not interacting with ANY canon characters except Bashir. My god. One poor canon character and 400 Mary Sues. It'll be like shooting ducks in a barrel."


	6. Chapter 4

Women. More women.

But the corridor of the strange story-ship was, strangely enough, **not** full of willowy movie stars inspired by too much anime. Crew-women strode by, engaged in their tasks, but no one's hair swished as she passed. No one's eye's sparkled like stars. No one heaved a double-D bosom unless she also had a bulging bottom and thunder thighs to match. Blythe and Bianca were surrounded by women with fat thighs, with acne scars, with bad haircuts, with chapped lips. Many of them were in their teens and twenties, true, but somehow that didn't make any of them more attractive. All around Blythe, women looked_ normal_.

"Are we in the right place?" asked Bianca softly beside her. "I don't think someone mistook _them_ for Mary Sues."

Blythe held up a hand for silence as she thought. Fanfiction was full of all-female crews, especially in Mary Sue stories. Their home planets tended to be called "Yamazonia," and they tended to be the brainchild of pouting young girls who'd just been given a C by a male profesor. But why would any disgruntled proto-feminist teenybopper give herself--or her loyal minnions--such horrible glasses and pimples? A few heartbeats passed before Blythe spoke.

"We're going to do our jobs," she said slowly and carefully, apparently choosing them with care. "We're going to be intelligence agents and we're going to investigate." She took a long, deep breath and carried on in a more normal tone, slightly vexed. "I don't know why we were sent here," she said, "but something strange is going on. And we're going to look."

--

"Crew #198. Non-canon. Race: human. Bit part."

"Crew #217. Non-canon. Race: human. Bit part."

"Guard #155. Non-canon. Race: human. Bit part."

Blythe swept the detector back and forth across the hall. "Figures," she said, in a more assured tone of voice. "They're all bit parts. Somewhere in here is the real Mary Sue for whose benefit this is all happening. We don't need a brief on any of these guys."

"I've got them all on charges of Fashion Copyright," grumbled Bianca as they stepped into a turbolift. "Those sleeveless tops with ninja scarves and gauntlets are straight off the old Ninja Gaiden video games. Bad crossover and totally unoriginal."

Blythe shrugged. "I don't think we can charge anyone on bad taste. But I still can't get over how chunky everyone around here seems, even for extras. Extras are supposed to look like John Cusack. But I've never seen so much acne outside of a Clearasil ad."

The other passenger in the lift turned towards them. "Well, I wouldn't exactly hand you the Miss America crown either," she said in a hurt tone. "I notice you don't have skin like lemon silk yourself."

Blythe froze. "You can hear us?"

The woman in the sparkly red tunic looked surprised. "I'm not deaf, you know."

Bianca's scanner was already chiming. She held the screen over so Blythe could read it. "Navigator: Joy Kawai. Non-canon. Race: human. Bit character."

"What's that?" asked Joy Kawai.

"We're checking your authorization," said Bianca, with a straight face. "There have been reports of unauthorized passengers. You are human and your name is Joy Kawai and you check out just fine."

"Oh, OK," said Joy. "And now that you've checked my authorization and commented on my personal appearance, are you going to pick a level?"

"Detention level!" said Blythe quickly.

"Bridge!" said Bianca half a second too late. The turbolift had already begun to move.

"Don't you think our _supposed intruder_ would head for the bridge?" nudged Bianca, waggling her fingers in the universal manner of, "here there be euphemism."

"No," said Blythe. "Well, maybe she is now, but eventually she's going to hook up with the canon character, which means she'll have to get to the detention level sooner or later."

"I don't like this," mumbled Bianca. "I really don't like this."

--

"WTF!" exploded Blythe, spelling out the letters the minute the turbolift doors swished behind them. "They're not supposed to be able to hear us!"

"Only the canon characters can't detect us," Bianca reminded her. "And in this story, the insertions outnumber the canon characters. We're surrounded by people who are as out of place as we are."

"This is going to make reconnaissance REALLY difficult," complained Blythe. "We're going to have to look like we fit in in order to catch anyone! This is worse than Mary Russell. At least in that story, the passersby weren't eavesdropping on our reports."

Bianca buried her face in her hands. "You have no idea," she groaned.


	7. Chapter 5

Bashir's guard changed every hour or so. Sometimes it seemed more often, sometimes less. Time seemed to stand still on the Night Ship, or progress unevenly, in fits and starts. In any case, the black scarves drawn over the faces of all the guards made them all seem interchangeable after a while. They all slouched. They all giggled.

"Shift change!" Two bare-armed and headscarfed newcomers replaced two of their lounging counterparts. One of them swept a small sensor around the anteroom, which beeped three times and flashed a green light.

"Out of character by only 8 percent," whispered Blythe to Bianca. "Still within tolerance."

"Keep it down," whispered Bianca. "Remember, the other guards can hear us."

One of the other guards took out a plastic slide whistle and tooted it with great ceremony. "Captain on the deck!" someone shouted.

A plain, eagle-nosed woman trotted into the detention area. She was no more than eighteen, and carried herself with the self-assured air of someone whose father is a better lawyer than your father. "You wanted to speak with me?" she inquired.

Dr. Bashir smiled wearily. The enforced charm was wearing thin and giving way to natural impatience. "Look," he sighed. "I really don't know who you are or what all this is about. But if you can plainly tell me who you are and why I'm here, I'm sure we can come to some sort of mutual understanding. We don't want to start a war here, do we?"

The captain looked pained. "The guards have been talking to you, haven't they?"

"They've told me that I'm not in any immediate danger," replied Bashir, but the captain was no longer listening.

"You guys," she was instructing the assembled, "are not supposed to be talking to him! The chain of command is here for a reason. People are going to be very upset."

"Don't look at me," snickered one of the guards. "I'm gay."

A glare from the captain made it clear that this conversation was quite over. She turned back to Dr. Bashir and sighed. "I'm sorry you have to go through all this," she said sympathetically. "You're not in any danger, and we're not planning anything against the Federation or Bajor. If we could release you and start everything right now, we would. But right now, the safest place you could be is right here, behind a force field. All this--" she waved around the well-lit brig, "--isn't to keep you in as much as to keep everyone else on this ship out. You have my word that we'll escort you to your other quarters as soon as everything has been arranged. But I'm happy to answer any questions that you have right now."

Bashir narrowed his eyes, unconvinced. "Who are you?" he repeated.

A scanner was thrust under Bianca's nose. Its screen read, "Captain Sonia Banaszak. Non-canon. Race: human. Bit character." Bianca nodded frantically and pushed it away. "Go figure!" mouthed Blythe behind the captain's back. Bianca waved her into silence.

"I am Captain Sonia Banaszak of the FanShare Alliance," the woman was saying, "and you are our first guest aboard the Night Ship. All of us have come together from across space and time to enjoy the pleasure of your company. And to spare everyone the catfights and unfair advantages enjoyed by certain of your admirers, we have secluded you safely in a restricted area until the schedule is complete and every fan is assigned a specific time to be with you."

Bashir tried to make sense of this bizarre commentary. He was, after all, no stranger to the dating game, but this was bordering on the absurd. "And what, specifically, am I supposed to do with these so-called admirers who are signing up to meet me?"

Captain Banaszak smiled like a cat. "Oh, they'll all have ideas. Your job is merely to put them into practice."

"Do I get any say in this?" pursued the doctor suspiciously.

"Not as such, no," replied the captain. "Everyone will get a turn, one way or the other. It's fairer that way. You just have to sit back, relax and enjoy the action."

"How do you propose to deal with the Federation vis a vis the abduction of a high-profile Starfleet doctor practicing in one of the most volatile areas of the galaxy?" inquired Bashir acidly.

"Oh, don't you worry about that." The captain dismissed this point with a wave of her hand. "The Night Ship is completely outside the rules of space and time. That's how we were able to pinpoint you from 300 years away. Deep Space Nine is still fine, and they won't even have time to notice you're gone. Consider yourself on vacation."

"And if I decline to participate in these... meetings?" Julian pushed.

"You don't really have that option," smiled Captain Banaszak kindly. "Besides, why would you want to? You've got 400 women from all walks of life getting hot just looking at you. A guy like you, this should be a dream come true!"

"Shift change!" Two headscarfed guards replaced Blythe and Bianca, and the rest of this exchange had to be left to the imagination.


	8. Chapter 6

Blythe was almost cataleptic. "My god, what a premise!" she raged. "You know, I almost thought it might be more sympathetic if we saw them rather than just reading the lines. But... oh my god! Never mind the Department of Mary Sues, we're going to have to send in the Disturbing Acts of Violence squad!"

"To be fair," murmured Bianca, "they did pick the horniest guy on the show. If they keep him in character, he might actually enjoy it."

Blythe rounded on her in fury. "Did you ever know any guys who were sexually assaulted?" "Um, no," said Bianca. "But--"

"Well, I do," Blythe cut her off. "His name is James Herbart and he lives in Boystown. And let me tell you, it is just as traumatic for them as it is for us. I can't believe you're trying to justify--"

"I'm not trying to justify this!" gagged Bianca. "I'm just as offended as you are! Believe me, I do not need a two-hour 80's movie to make me disapprove of four hundred fangirls kidnapping and gang-raping a character, no matter what his personal life looks like!"

Blythe deflated a bit. "This is a monstrosity, " she said more calmly. "On the plus side, though, we are now probationary assassins, which means that when the continuum has been completely derailed, we can step out and shoot the disgusting characters in question and not have to sit on the sidelines writing reports until the travesty is complete."

Bianca shook her head. "Four hundred Mary Sues is going to be a bit difficult, even with phasers," she sighed. "They can all see us and they've got a lot of armed guards."

"Interchangeable masked guards who do a lot more giggling than guarding," grinned Blythe. "That was a stroke of luck for us interlopers. Besides, remember that most of these guys aren't Mary Sues, they're just here to chew the scenery--including that smug-pussed captain. I'm actually betting there's only one Mary Sue who's at the bottom of this, running this entire charade for her own satisfaction."

Bianca looked dubious. "I could have sworn it was the captain, too. I still think we should have a look around the bridge. If she's running the show, she ought to be up there."

--

Blythe bowed to her partner's insistence, and they went up to the bridge. However, after a few awkward moments, it became clear that their efforts were for naught. Although the bridge was manned entirely by teenage girls, their tasks were carried out in near silence or in sound bites stolen from Star Trek dialogue. Although painstakingly featured and costumed, it was clear that they were no more than bit parts, designed to keep the ship running while the real action happened elsewhere. The agents returned to the lower decks frustrated and disgruntled. Bianca was all for searching the ship from top to bottom, but Blythe pointed out the high proportion of dialogue delivered by Julian Bashir throughout the story, and insisted that they return to the detention area and observe the characters who came to interact with him. Bianca couldn't think of a good argument, so they initiated another impromptu shift change and replaced another set of masked guards.

Bashir was pacing back and forth in his cell when the agents took up their places. Guarding him--or pretending to--was a mind-numbingly boring job, though Bianca, as a longtime Bashir fan, was probably enjoying the eye candy. He was extremely handsome, even in his worried state. Blythe inspected his cell idly and wondered where in it he was able to go to the bathroom. Ten minutes dragged by.

Mercifully, at this point, an announcement was broadcast over the P.A. system ("For all the world, like a high school!" snorted Bianca) that all mission personnel were to report to the main hall for assignation. "Grammar error!" pounced Blythe. "Assignment, not assignation. Assignation is the meeting, and he's still here."

"No, they mean assignation," corrected one of the other two guards. "We're supposed to bring him up in ten minutes, remember?" This guard also had a foreign accent, English or South African or something. Blythe was too busy adding to her charge sheet to pay attention.

The fourth guard, who apparently didn't speak English, addressed Bashir and asked him something, presumably, "Are you ready?" or the like.

"What language is that?" whispered Blythe to Bianca. "German?"

("What? No!" replied Julian.")

"Dutch," replied Bianca. "My dad worked in Holland for a year so we went with him. Bashir can understand it because he's got a universal translator. But we can't. That was one of..."

(The guard said something else, still in Dutch.) "One of what?" inquired Blythe.

("All right," said Bashir bravely.)

"Never mind," said Bianca quickly.

"No, really," insisted Blythe. "What were you going to say?"

An orange phaser blast cut off her words as the fourth guard whirled around and began shooting. In an instant, Bianca had thrown herself in front of her partner, directly into the path of fire. Blythe, caught off guard, fell to the floor under Bianca's unconscious weight.

"Bianca? Bianca!" spluttered Blythe, unsure if the agent was truly stunned or just faking it. The guard fired again, and Blythe dropped her head limply to the floor as the beam lanced past her shoulder and hit Bianca's arm.

The guard, satisfied that her companions were neutralized, disabled the force field holding Bashir prisoner. "Come on!" she shouted, in perfect American English. "In ten minutes they'll know you're missing." Bashir swung around a pillar and broke into a run.

"Shit. Shit. Shit," hissed Blythe, as she fumbled for her equipment while still trying to play dead. From under Bianca's head she could just make out a muffled beeping and a flashing red light. On the screen half-concealed by Bianca's drooping scarf she could just make out the words, "...human. MARY SUE."

The Mary Sue and Dr. Bashir were already out of the detention area and racing down the hall. "Bianca!" hissed Blythe desperately, shaking her partner's shoulders. But the stunned agent only breathed lightly and flopped over into Blythe's lap. "Shit!" cursed Blythe, as she struggled to her feet. Leaving Bianca unconscious on the floor, she dashed after the retreating culprit. At the far end of the hall, the Sue was herding Bashir into a turbolift. The doors closed with a final swish and the turbolift began to descend.


	9. Chapter 7

Hand over hand, Blythe hurtled down the emergency ladder. She could see the turbolift come to rest far below and wondered if it was too far to jump. Fortunately, the lift had only descended about six levels. She wondered how quickly she could scale the remaining three and whether she would be in time to catch the Sue when she arrived. This was really needlessly difficult. Mary Sues were supposed to stay in the plot line, not hijack the canon character and start running.

The turbolift lit up again and Blythe had a momentary vision of what would happen if it started to rise. In a moment of panic, she swung off the ladder and fell the remaining two levels onto the top of the lift. The subsequent landing was ungraceful to say the least, and was accompanied by stabbing pains in Blythe's palms and calves. Curled up and groaning on the lift's upper plating, Blythe cursed Mary Sues, hair-brained authors who didn't know how safety ladders were supposed to work, insufficiently padded PPC boots, and Batman who made the whole operation look so easy.

After some moments of this, she realized that the lift was, in fact not moving yet, and she should seize the opportunity to exit the shaft. She wondered, as she kicked her way through the emergency hatch and jumped rather more lightly onto the new deck, why anyone would put an emergency hatch in the ceiling; she made a mental note of this and wondered if there was a badfic charge of "stupid starship design." Probably not. The original Enterprise had no seat belts and no surge protectors... pot... kettle... whatever.

She undoubtedly would have lost her quarry had the Mary Sue not called in robust tones, "This one! Quickly!" which was unintelligent for someone trying to escape. Blythe followed the voice into a large shuttle bay ("Spaceballs," thought Blythe) and was just in time to see a small shuttle powering up. The lights on the bay door began to flash, and again Blythe was plagued with a vision of what would happen to her if the bay was decompressed. This time she calmed herself with the notion that most authors would not know what decompression was--as many far better Star Trek writers did not--and that there would probably be nothing more lethal than a strong wind as the shuttle sailed off into space. However, this too was less than ideal, as it would mean losing the Mary Sue completely and having to restart the story at another point with an incomplete charge sheet.

Blythe ran her fingers across the main console of the bay controls. They blurred for a moment, like Pratchett's fairy horizon, and Blythe suspected that they had not been strictly written into the original story. However, the plot imperative of S-space soon eliminated the fuzz, and the words, "Intruder-Friendly Operating System, press any key to continue," appeared in cheerful Star Trek font beneath her fingers. Blythe smiled indulgently as she pressed the key for, "Close doors." Of course it would have to be an intruder-friendly system--otherwise, how would the Sue herself be able to work it? The bay doors powered down, and Blythe breathed a sigh of relief. They flashed again; Blythe shut them down again. They flashed again; Blythe repeated the command. She smiled, picturing the expression on the Mary Sue's face inside the shuttle. _Do flawlessly poised Mary Sues shout, "Damn this thing! Open, dammit!" and bang on the consoles? Probably not. Any minute now she ought to be fixing the problem with a bobby pin._

Sure enough, the shuttle door swung up, and a truly irritated Mary Sue came sprinting out. Blythe crouched down and slowly maneuvered herself around the console so as to come around in front of it just as the Sue sprang behind it. While the Sue pounded the control panel, Blythe dashed for the shuttle. She sprang through the door and concealed herself behind a curtain ("Note to self--curtain, why?") mere seconds before the Sue's return.

Bashir was waiting nervously in the copilot's seat as Mary Sue slid gracefully into the navigator's chair and thumped the control panel. This time, wonder of wonders, the bay doors opened and stayed open. The shuttle sped through the doors and out into space.

"How can I ever thank you?" breathed Bashir.

"Oh God," thought Blythe. "Here we go."

The usual batch of stilted dialogue played out. Julian would be eternally grateful to her for saving him, no no, kind sir, you are too kind, but why, why, because it was the right thing to do...

"I couldn't stand the thought of all those girls just grabbing you and passing you around. You're not just a pretty face--" Blythe hoped that her loud snort would not be audible to the lovebirds, "--you're a human being. You should be with someone because you love them, not because they've glomped you and they feel they're entitled to a turn or something."

"How could you be a part of such a scheme?" Julian wondered. Blythe had to stuff her detector down her shirt to drown out its beeping as Bashir's percentage rose from 10 to 20 to almost 35 percent out of character. Understanding the word "glomp" alone jumped him nine percentage points.

Ah no, you see, the Sue had only pretended to play along with her scheming friends, joining their organization on the lowest level, disguising her true identity in order to foil their nefarious plot and save Bashir from their clutches. _Easier to chuck a clog into the engines and prevent them ever getting off the ground at all, _Blythe noted sardonically._ If that's your only excuse, why are you still here?_

"They'll kill me if we're caught," the Sue went on soulfully. "They'll think I'm trying to keep you for myself. They'd never believe I'm trying to set you free." _T__hat makes four hundred and one of us,_ thought Blythe in disgust. _I don't know who she thinks she's kidding, with those Bambi eyes you can see four parsecs away. Look at me, I'm not a smoldering rapist like everyone else around you, we're thrown together in times of danger, it must be fate, kiss me quick before you get a clue. Any minute now he's going to ask her to... _

"Let me see your face." The subsequent interchange would probably have been a lot less poignant, even from the Sue's perspective, if either speaker could have seen the motions Blythe was making from behind the curtain. No, no, I have a shocking secret identity or am bodaciously ugly. You have such beautiful eyes. Why thank you, they match my ears.

It was peace itself to hear the alert klaxon start to beep and feel the ship beneath them lurch and shudder. "They've found us!" cried the Sue tremulously.

"Thank God," Blythe couldn't help but add. The Sue scuttled bravely about the cabin in a generic pantomime of looking busy; she flipped switches and pressed buttons bravely, but could do nothing about the tractor beam that was holding them. Up and up they rose, back to the Night Ship. Even the day-saving powers of Mary Sue were powerless to interfere.

--

A dozen hands reached through the portal and seized Bashir. Blythe wished she could have had a better view of this little maneuver--either some major laws of human anatomy had just been violated or the Night Ship employed a special Gumby patrol to retrieve runaways. "Let him go!" cried the Sue heroically, before she too was dragged out.

After a moment's hesitation, Blythe stepped out, too. After all, she was still dressed as guard and ought to be completely indistinguishable from the arresting angels around her. A circle had formed around the Mary Sue, and Captain Banaszak was delivering fire and brimstone to the errant girl who had thought to thwart the fair dealings of the FanShare Alliance and steal sexy Julian all for herself. The Sue declaimed herself a hero and a saint for trying to free Bashir from this subhuman slavery; the captain proclaimed her a traitor and a thief.

"And now," said the captain dramatically, "let's see who you really are!" She pulled the scarf from the Sue's face--and if, Blythe wondered, it came off so easily without strangling her or even mussing her hair, how ever did it stay on in the first place?--revealing the defiant face of...

"Bianca?!"

Bianca Reese stared back at the half-dozen fangirls around her. The captain gasped and drew her hands to her mouth. "You...!"

"Bianca!" shrieked Blythe in panic. "What are you doing here? What do you think you're playing at?"

The two guards who were holding Bianca drew her back as Blythe ran forward. Another laid a hand on Blythe as she tried to drag her partner away. Bianca struggled, Blythe elbowed the meddler in the ribs, and someone's phaser was knocked to the ground. One guard dived for the weapon, but Blythe, noting that it was not _her_ phaser that had gone missing, stunned her before she could pull the trigger. Now phasers were everywhere, shooting with a randomness that would have made an Imperial stormtrooper proud. Blythe stunned three more guards and dodged two shots, Bianca took down one, and Bashir, surprisingly enough, punched the last guard who was too shy to shoot him. Blythe seized her partner in one arm and the canon character with the other and dragged them both around the corner and into the next cargo bay.

"Bianca Reese!" she spluttered. "What the heck was all that? Are you OK? I thought you were knocked out... I was going to go back for you... How did you get down here so fast? What have you been doing? You got yourself some major 'splaining to do, girlfriend!"

Bianca Reese stared at her with blank, uncomprehending eyes. It was Bianca, surely, but yet... surely her hair wasn't highlighted so blond, was it? Or so long? Blythe slowly took in the smooth features, the girlish figure, the... _braces_...

"Oh no," whispered Blythe. "It can't be... No..."


	10. Chapter 8

Blythe buried her face in her hands. Surely it couldn't be. It shouldn't be. But there it was, the inescapable conclusion, creeping into her mind like a Greek tragedy, only with fangirls instead of sphinxes. The real Bianca Reese--Agent Bianca Reese of the PPC-- was twenty years old. This girl before her was no more than fifteen. "No..." Blythe groaned. "Not true. Not fair. Not now."

"Who are you?" asked Bianca.

Blythe's head snapped up. "Bianca Reese, I'm going to kill you! You miserable, backstabbing... Mary Sue!"

"What exactly is going on here?" asked Dr. Bashir.

"This..." Blythe addressed herself to him, "this little... troll... was... I mean will be... aaugh!" She ran her fingers through her hair in despair.

"Oh no," said a little voice from the hall. They all turned to see Agent Bianca standing in the doorway, her own scarf down about her throat, looking as if Satan has just met the Antichrist and they were about to have a nice little chat about ways and means.

"You!" spluttered Blythe. "You...!"

"Please," begged Bianca. "I can explain!"

Blythe folded her arms and glared icily at her partner. Complete silence reigned in the cargo bay. Agent Bianca wrung her hands in consternation. Young Bianca stared at her older counterpart in disbelief.

"Thank you," said Blythe coldly, "for that truly enlightening explanation. It explains everything about your conduct in this matter, from the time you were frank and open with me about the fact that it was your story we were investigating, to when you deliberately misled me around the ship and tried to distract me from finding the real Mary Sue. You knew all along what we were looking for, didn't you?"

"I swear, I didn't!" whispered Bianca. "Not at first."

"How could you not know?" Blythe exploded. "How? It was your story I shoved across your desk this afternoon! It was your story that we're carrying printouts of right now! Every detail of this ship was designed by you! Every line of atrocious dialogue was written by you! How can you expect me to believe that you didn't know?"

"Blythe, I swear... I didn't recognize it at first! It's been seven years since I wrote this story and posted it on some alt-net site. I swear, that site died years ago and I haven't so much as looked at the story ever since. The bits we looked at at headquarters were not major scenes with my character, so I didn't recognize them. All I saw was the name psychokitty514, and I swear, Blythe, that was not me. Some copycat must have copied my story and reposted it under their own name. It wasn't until we walked around the ship and I saw my high school friends cast as the crew that I started to realize where we were. Blythe... I'm so sorry! I wanted to tell you, but I didn't know how. I didn't want to sabotage the mission, but I didn't know what would happen when we found out for sure."

The chill in the air could have frozen beer. "I don't know you anymore," said Blythe.

Bianca hung her head.

"You! Drop the phaser! Now!" Blythe had turned to catch Young Bianca trying to sneak Dr. Bashir to freedom. Her quarry safely assured, she turned back to her pleading fellow agent. "You deliberately pushed me into the line of fire when she started shooting back there," she accused.

Bianca blanched. "No!" she cried. "I pushed myself into the line of fire! I knocked you over so you wouldn't get hit!"

Blythe threw up her hands. "And wouldn't a simpler way to accomplish that have been to _warn me_ beforehand that one guard was about to wipe out the others? Geez, how could I not realize that this was your story... you still think the same way."

"Blythe, please... I didn't know what to do!"

"Well, just about anything would have been better than lying to me, screwing up the mission, and then trying to get me shot up."

"Blythe! I didn't mean to! I'm sorry about everything!"

Agent Blythe turned away from Bianca. "This conversation is finished," she said frostily. "And so is this mission. I have had it up to _here_ with selfish fangirls who try to warp the universe for their personal benefit. _You_," she addressed Young Bianca, "are hereby charged with three counts of Mary Sue, namely shameless self-insertion, glomping a canon character thereby causing character rupture, and engendering and/or benefitting from disturbing acts of violence. You are also indicted with several minor counts of temporal incongruity within a story, extra-canonical context well above maximum tolerance, and by your own author's admission, populating a Star Trek ship with ninjas. You are hereby to be removed from the universe to restore the canon to its balance. If you have any last words before your sentence is carried out, say them to yourself because no one else wants to hear them."

Blythe set her phaser on vaporize and raised it to chest level. Both Dr. Bashir and Agent Bianca sprang in front of the Sue to shield her. "Bianca, get him away," said Blythe kindly, forgetting for a moment that Bianca was in disgrace.

"Blythe, no!" cried Bianca.

Blythe rolled her eyes. Of course, it couldn't be a normal mission where one lovestruck canon character tries to defend the Mary Sue, is restrained by your trusty partner, and returns to normal once the brainwashing Sue is no more. No, indeed. Now your partner has to be mind-eff'ed, too.

"I see," she replied. "So killing Sues is okay as long as they're not _your_ Sues?"

"Blythe, that's me you're shooting at!" begged Bianca.

"Yes, I know," Blythe countered. "And if I were you, I'd at least have the good grace to be ashamed of it. You might as well have given yourself better hair and fewer zits, I might add, if you were going to bother at all."

"Blythe, listen," Now Bianca wasn't begging; she was dead serious. "I'm not defending what I wrote. I'll be the first to admit that it's a disturbing piece of worthless drivel. I'll admit I put myself in the driver's seat as a shameless Mary Sue. And if the original site had not died when it did, I would have taken the story down myself as soon as I was mature enough to be ashamed of it. But I was barely fourteen. Nobody's Nora Roberts when they're fourteen. And thanks to some psycho kitty, the garbage I wrote when I was fourteen is still clogging up cyberspace.

"Blythe, that's me in the story. It's not some Mary Sue who's prettier than me and smarter than me and can beat up Superman and out-wiz Harry Potter. It's an exact insertion of me, with all my youth and failings. You're looking at my fourteen-year-old self stuck in its pages. And if you assassinate her, I'll go, too."

"Is this some sort of time travel thing?" inquired Bashir, who had been sensibly keeping his mouth shut as he tried to follow the events around him.

"Sort of," sighed Bianca. "I grew up and left her behind me, but here in S-space we're both still around. I move around stories; she moves around stories. If you vaporize her, Blythe, she's never going to grow up into me."

"You're not a character," Blythe reminded her. "Stop acting like one."

"Sure I am!" persisted Agent Bianca. "And so are you! All PPC agents are characters. Your name isn't really Blythe Grimm, is it? And how many months have passed in real time since this story was first blocked out? Are you five years older than you were when we left HQ? I am what happens when that starry-eyed little drool monster in the corner grows up. I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to be vaporized for what she did to Bashir, I'm saying that if you take her out, I'll be _Back to the Futured _out of existence!"

"She hasn't done anything to me," insisted Bashir. "She was trying to rescue me. And speaking of rescue, we should probably continue this conversation elsewhere if we don't want--"

"She was rescuing you from a scenario she designed," Blythe informed him. "Trust us, Dr. Bashir: we're only trying to protect you. Just step fifteen feet away from the Mary Sue and concentrate, your mind will return to normal--you'll see her for what she really is. We've got you covered."

Bashir planted his feet firmly on the deck. "I won't let you hurt her."

"Blythe..." Bianca coaxed.

Blythe spun around. "You have some nerve!" she exploded. "You lie to me, you drag me around, you stab me in the back, and now you're trying to prevent me from doing my job because if I do, it'll be the worse for you? Well, let me tell you something, _Agent Reese_, you got yourself into this mess, so don't expect me to get you out of it. You say if I assassinate this Sue--which was our orders--I will rewrite history so that I never join forces with some hypocritical little toad who helps me weed out Mary Sues while cultivating her own little stash? Well, that's not a problem, sister, that's positively a _perk!_"

All through this exchange, the Mary Sue--Young Bianca--had been striving vainly for a pass at the doorway. Now suddenly, she drew up the scarf that the captain had pulled down and sprang back, not towards the exit but away from it. Blythe swerved her own weapon with a shout, but in her blind fury, she had missed what the Sue had not. Dozens of reinforcements now burst into the cargo bay with shouts and weapons. In an instant, Young Bianca shoved her older self forward. "It's Bianca!" she cried. "She's the one! Get her!"

Blythe was completely overwhelmed as dozens of guards swirled around her. Six guards descended on Bashir, manacling him with unnecessary enthusiasm. Another five seized Agent Bianca, pinning her arms and lifting her off her feet. "Get off me!" she spluttered. "You idiots... I'm not the one!"

A girl in a green dress stepped forward and addressed the struggling agent. "Bianca Reese, you are arrested for high treason against the FanShare Alliance. You are going to wish you had never been born."

"Get off me!" howled Bianca, more amused than frightened. "I'm not the one that did this!"

"Oh yes you are!" piped up Blythe. She shot out an arm and caught Young Bianca by the shoulder as she was trying to melt into the crowd. She stuck a phaser in the girl's ribs to communicate what would happen if another escape were attempted. "Take her away, girls. Your younger sister and I will just stay here for a little... chat."

The girl in the green dress gestured to the horde. "Take Julian up to his quarters and inform the girls that he has returned. And take this traitor to the Hall of Judgment."

Bianca was not listening. "Blythe..." she begged. "Blythe, come on. Don't do this, Blythe. I'm your partner."

"Take her away, guards!"

"Blythe...! I'm not asking you to let her off, just don't... oh my god... Blythe! BLYTHE!"


	11. Chapter 9

They had drugged him. He was sure of it.

There couldn't be any other explanation for the clouds of pink fog now filling his head. His mind had been clear—confused, but clear—until they had taken her away from him. Now her face filled every corner of his consciousness. So lovely. So frightened. And now she was in danger…

Bashir gripped the back of the sofa and tried to focus. He tried to remember what the rogue guard had said about her being the cause of… something, but the heavy pink sedative sensation came back and all he could see were those fearful eyes, those trembling lips, those… funny silver things on her teeth. _Wait a minute… she hadn't been fearful, had she? She had seemed positively annoyed!_

Another pink wave washed over him, and Julian gave up. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a little voice of reason screamed, but it was no use. A burning desire rose in him, so sudden and fierce that it seized hold of his limbs and forced him into motion. A word. A dream. A duty.

For some reason, he felt he should be wearing a cape.

With a sigh, Julian picked up the ceramic Horgon from its decorative plinth and gently concussed the fangirl who was feeding him grapes and telling him her life story.


	12. Chapter 10

"Stop trying to escape already! In case you hadn't noticed, you're hopelessly inept at it!"

Blythe marched the petulant Sue into one of the storage lockers at the far side of the cargo bay. With one blast of her phaser, she melted the catch of the door. "There!" she griped. "Now knock it off."

Young Bianca pouted. To her credit, this was not the least bit sexy. "That," she declared, "was a really stupid thing to do. Now you're locked in here, too."

"But I," Blythe corrected her, "can open a portal back to my office at any time I choose, whereas you have no such option. Now shut up and let me read ahead." She turned back to the printout she had been perusing.

"Julian's in danger!" wailed the Mary Sue. "We have to rescue him!"

Blythe rolled her eyes. "I hate to break it to you, sister, but 'Julian' is a physician and an officer twice your age and with more military experience than you will ever have in two lifetimes. Contrary to popular opinion, he virtually never needs to be rescued by fourteen-year-old girls. And as far as I can tell, he's actually quite safe at the moment. _Bored out of his gourd_, but safe."

"Think of what they might be doing to him!" Young Bianca urged.

Blythe burst out laughing. "You are _scum_, you know that? Scum! Agent Bianca—your older self—sticks up for you, she defends your inexcusable conduct, she prevents me from vaporizing you on the spot, and you… you betray her into the hands of these bloodthirsty fangirls, you sell her down the river without a thought, and now you're worried about _Bashir?_ If I were you, I'd be worried about that poor agent who's even now getting tried by a scene that makes _Star Trek VI_ look like _Rumpole of the Bailey_."

"She had it coming to her," mumbled Young Bianca guiltily. "We would have gotten away completely if it hadn't been for you two!"

"No you wouldn't have!" spluttered Blythe. "You had already been arrested and brought back here when I tried to save your sorry ass. You knew exactly what you were in for, and you shoved Agent Reese right into it!"

"They would have killed me!" whined the Sue. "You don't know those girls. They would have tortured me to death rather than let a single person take Julian for herself."

"So you're letting them torture the agent who stood up for you instead?" _…And expecting this to endear you to the character who's supposedly attracted to your selfless inner nobility?_

"Better her than me," grumbled the Mary Sue.

Blythe finished the page she was on, and turned to the next. After a few paragraphs, she looked up with a strange smile.

"You know," she smirked, "I think you're right. I think we would all rather have these scenes played out with her in place of you. Yes. I think that is for the best."

Young Bianca was melodramatic and manipulative, but she was no fool. "Why?" she asked suspiciously.

No response.


	13. Chapter 11

Fires leapt up on either side of the double doors. Great stone pillars held up the vast plated ceiling, their intricately carved sides illuminated by the flickering light within. A stone dais rose above the smoky floor, its inhabitant ensconced like Moses on the mountain. Rising iron benches spiraled up and out from the interior, their occupants waving electric torches and shrieking vicious cries. In the midst of the red glow, the center pit yawned like the mouth of hell.

"Hoi! Hoi! Hoi! Hoi!"

From the bottom of the lowest ring, Agent Bianca cringed. Never mind intimidating… this was positively _embarrassing._

"Bianca Reese!" Sonia thundered. "You have been caught in an act of high treason against the FanShare Alliance. By your perfidious schemes, you have sought to seize the object of our adoration and use him for your own purposes. Your falseness has cast the fair sharing of our Alliance into disrepute. You have betrayed your friends and dishonored our purpose. Do you have anything to say before sentence is carried out against you?"

"Yes!" snorted Bianca. "Why are there open flames on a starship? Electric torches I can understand, very suitable, very Klingon, but… open flames? Do you want us all to asphyxiate?"

Sonia mumbled a few words to a masked guard, who descended the dais to whisper something to an engineer and pantomimed something like "big glass globe for that thing over there." "Do you have anything else to say?" the captain pursued.

"Yes," beamed Bianca. "I would like to thank the Academy for giving me this award, and I would like to thank you all, some of whom I haven't seen in years, for coming to share this moment with me. I want to thank my partner Blythe for being totally unsupportive about all this, my dog because she's cute and furry, and Alicia Keyes and Rufus Wainwright for being my constant source of inspiration. I also should thank Jesus because it seems that everybody thanks him at this point, though what Jesus has to do with fan fiction, I'm not sure. I never could have made it this far without my mom, whom I love from the bottom of my heart as long as she's more than 20 miles away from me. I want to—"

"Do you have anything RELEVANT to say?" the captain bellowed.

Bianca considered. "Not particularly," she decided at last. "I think I'm supposed to make a big speech about what a soulless bunch of character-snatching mind-sluts you all are, but I can't remember any of it and really it strikes me as kind of a rude thing to say. After all, you are supposed to be my friends."

Sonia blinked uncertainly. This was not how the scene was supposed to go, was it? Now some of the fangirls on the benches were starting to whisper. She banged her iron gavel, which clanked like a poker, and tried again.

"You have been found guilty before this court of thwarting the intentions of all true fan sharing across the galaxy. For this crime you will suffer the most ferocious doom. Can you offer any justification for your atrocious behavior?"

"The fact that your behavior is even worse?" Bianca essayed.

"I call upon all the fans to reject this answer!" Captain Banaszak stood up on her high seat and raised her arms as the benches all around erupted in cries of "Hoi! Hoi! Hoi! Hoi!" Hundreds of torches were thrust into the air; hundreds of feet drummed on iron deckplates, and all around them echoed the voices of fangirls shouting for blood.

"Hoi! Hoi! Hoi! Hoi!" cheered Bianca obediently.

Captain Sonia's glared down at her prisoner with mounting irritation The words, "Stop it!" broke from her mouth before she could restrain them. The fans on the benches stopped shouting in surprise. Sonia looked embarrassed, realized how silly she looked standing on a chair, sat down, glared at Bianca, and tried again. "And now, traitorous one, the court will pronounce your doom."

Bianca broke into song.  
_Look down, look down  
You're standing in your grave.  
Look down, look down,  
Your legs could use a shave.  
I wrote you all,  
Pathetic but it's true,  
Look down, look down,  
Pronounce O Mary Sue._

Captain Sonia threw up her hands. "What on earth is wrong with you?" she screeched. "I'm about to doom you to a gruesome death! Stop singing!"

Now Bianca really did smile. "That was such a Sonia moment," she grinned. "I miss all those Trek fests on the school bus. I'm sorry I put you in this story, Sonia-San. I swear, I never actually resented you this much in real life. I wish we hadn't lost touch after high school."

Something flickered in Sonia Banaszak's face. Character and plot elements delivered conflicting directives. This scene was getting far too complicated for her taste. Nevertheless, she knew what was supposed to happen and doggedly pushed forward. "Your failure to recognize the severity of your crime only makes the penalty more severe," she began. "You will suffer most dreadfully the most extreme tortures the united minds of fandom can design for you."

"I get the picture!" Bianca rolled her eyes. "Now get to the interesting part. I don't actually remember what punishment I decided on. Apparently it was so trite that even I can't recollect it."

The spectators on the benches were now talking audibly. Bianca could catch the words, "Come on!" and, "We don't have to stand for this!" and, "Shut her up already!" as well as the traditional, "…rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb…" Sonia banged her gavel as hard as she could, and yelped to discover that slamming an iron mallet against a stone table is the best way imaginable to permanently damage your wrist.

"For your heinous crimes, you, Bianca Reese, are sentenced to be cast into the Balzac pit, where you will writhe in agony until you are completely destroyed and only your skull remains as a warning to other traitors."

This was what the spectators on the benches had been waiting for. They cheered and hollered and thumped their torches on the floor; they shook their fists in the air and contorted their faces into artificial snarls of vengeance. The whole effect was rather spoiled by the condemned prisoner falling on the floor as she laughed a stitch into her side.

"The Balzac pit?" guffawed Bianca. "The _Balzac pit??_ That's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever…" She collapsed into another fit of giggles and tried again. "You _idiots!_ It's the _Sarlac pit_ and it's a sand-dwelling monster that lives in a _hole_ and wouldn't fit on a starship unless you chainsawed through a dozen decks!" She banged the floor in her mirth and added to herself: _the Balzac pit, you pea-brained Sues, is a carrel in a library somewhere, because Balzac is the French author who wrote A Study of Woman, a work which all of you might have some occasion to study!_

Captain Sonia looked positively miffed. "Tremble, traitor!" she shouted. "Writhe in fear as you approach the horror of the Balzac!" She raised her arms again (Bianca was tempted to shout, "Gooooooaaaalll!") and four guards began cranking a great stone wheel. Chains clanked, and the dais of judgment slid back to reveal a flickering red glow. The assembled fangirls all stopped cheering and gasped in dread. Two of them fainted, just because it's the type of thing that girls do in stories. (Fainting on an iron bench is not a wise thing to do, and their prone bodies went _clonk, clonk, clonk_ in the background until their friends on lower levels caught them.)

"Oh, come on," snorted Bianca. "I'm not afraid of you. I _wrote_ you! You're the embodiment of everything in high school that I didn't want to be! You're shallow, you're singleminded, you're the caricatures of everyone I wanted to beat!" Guards leaned over the railing to drag her towards the pit; Bianca paused her oration in order to smack and kick at them.

"I'm twenty years old, and you're still fifteen!" Someone threw a rope around her ankles and pulled it tight. "You're still trapped on the school bus obsessing over fictional characters—" Now they had her out on the floor and were dragging her through the dry ice towards the void. "…and I'm out learning a living! I don't need to beat you anymore!" Bianca kicked and struggled as they reached the precipice. "Get off me, you clowns! I'm a real writer with a real boyfriend and you're still trapped in this teenage fantasy. Let go of me! There's nothing you can do to me!"

It was all just pouring out of her, all the things she'd been wanting to say since she found herself face-to-face with the cardboard cutout characters who looked like old friends. She could almost imagine herself ripping free of the bit characters, leaping onto the judge's podium, and heroically shouting, "You're too late! I've read _The Secret Sharer!_ I have taken my night journey, and you have no power over me!" The entire nightmare would then shatter and she would wake up in Blythe's office with her face stuck to the vinyl backrest of an armchair. That was when she caught a glimpse of the Balzac below them.

It had flames. It had fangs. It had claws. It had a huge slavering mouth that dripped slime and bile and acid. Its enormous maw snapped viciously, spraying smoke and slime across Bianca's cheek. Perhaps Mary Sues were supposed to be immune to such petty chemical damage, but Bianca shrieked and dabbed hurriedly with her scarf as the poisonous discharge stung her face. A shout went up among the assembled fangirls.

Bianca flailed for a grip as the guards pushed and shoved her. "Let go of me, you idiots! You're wasting your time! Stop it! Ow!"

The Balzac reared and snapped again, and Bianca tried to turn and duck. Someone from behind her slammed her knees; Bianca lost her balance, and fell with a scream into the pit.

"Hoi! Hoi! Hoi! Hoi!"


	14. Chapter 12

They really had sawed through a dozen decks, hadn't they?

That's what happens when you fall through the cracks in the story—for an instant, you can see onto the set and glimpse all the work that had to be done to make this thing fly. The author mandates that a Sarlac pit be built inside a floating space vessel designed for passenger transport, but doesn't actually specify how it's to be accomplished. And she certainly doesn't specify that it has to be done neatly—she's too busy describing the inner emotions of her heroes, what they're wearing, how their screams ululate. It's not like any of the characters are scripted to notice the wall décor as they plummet to their deaths. Why waste the resources of S-space finishing off and explaining something that no one's going to look at?

This was what Bianca thought afterward. At the time, she was too busy flailing for a grip on something, anything, as she fell towards the Balzac's open jaws. The smoke from its totally unnecessary flames obscured everything in her field of vision, making her eyes water; afterwards, she recalled that although her eyes had been stinging and her boots seared by the heat, there had not been any stench at all.

Blind panic gripped Bianca, and for an instant, she really believed she was going to be disemboweled. But then the rope around her ankles caught on a warped metal beam—she caught a glimpse of the hastily-sawn deck levels through the smoke—and broke her fall still twenty feet above the Balzac's fangs. Now she was hanging upside-down from her ankles as the slavering monster slashed and snapped at her. She drew a deep breath and choked on the smoke. Why, why did she have to write a flaming beast? Wouldn't a nice alligator have sufficed? _Because I'm pyrophobic,_ she answered herself as she tried to pull herself up,_ and I wrote a fate that would have scared me most._ Another jet of fire singed her eyebrows and she yowled. _And right now, it's working beautifully. At least I didn't give it wings!_

The snagged rope swayed dangerously as she curled and twisted upwards; Bianca froze in place lest it should slip. Another jet of slime sprayed past her face, but she didn't dare reach for her scarf. Now the Balzac was rising on its haunches, every repulsive feature displayed beneath her. Bianca closed her eyes. _Breathe,_ she thought. _Just breathe. You wrote this. You got off on this. And now you have to live through it. You're not going to be eaten. You're not going to get third-degree burns. You're not going to get acid-etched. You just have to hold on. _

She was not going to scream out loud. She was an agent of the PPC. She was a self-aware operator of S-space, who knew that every scene has a beginning, middle, and eventually, an end.

Any moment now her hair was going to catch fire.

She knew what was coming.

Involuntary motor functions took over, and Bianca began to tremble. She tried to stop, but it was no use. Now the rope was shaking, and any second, it was going to—

Two strong arms caught her about the waist and pulled her upwards. Her legs gave way, and she fell feebly into the arms of someone dark and well-built.

"I've got you," said Dr. Bashir.


	15. Chapter 13

Sooner or later, Blythe knew she was going to have to shoot her.

She tried to remember every rotten Mary Sue that she had ever _wanted _to shoot. She thought about _The Angel of the Opera_ and _The Beekeeper's Apprentice_ and other missions when she would have like nothing better than to pull the trigger but was only there as an intelligence agent. She tried to conjure up those feelings.

Blythe pictured the plain, beefy face of Mary Russell screwed up in heroic determination as she prepared to take a bullet meant for Sherlock Holmes. She pictured Patricia Moriarty, the hackneyed Mary Sue nemesis, arrogantly lecturing the trapped and helpless Holmes about his propensity to underestimate the power of women. Sherlock Holmes, the classic strategist, the cold-hearted judge of men and women alike, having to sit through such nonsense! And of course, having to accept without question that crime was hereditary, and that a daughter should have no purpose in life other than replicating the deeds of her late father. Blythe had just been itching to have her trampled by a runaway horse, if only she'd had assassinary discretion that time. She pictured Irene Adler, slyly reading the juicier passages at Blythe's own trial—Lord Elrond's Court of Canon Grievances, one count of Mary Sue on Blythe's cross-dressing heroine Christopher Hunter—and wondered what Madame Irene would have said to Miss Moriarty. "Get bent, you petty excuse for a strong female character? I taught him that lesson in 1883 and he's never forgotten it? "

The palm of her phaser hand was getting sweaty and Young Bianca's nervous expression was segueing into bored. Blythe's own trial… why did she have to keep thinking about it at a time like this? Because that was the problem. It wasn't like she was Lord Elrond's favorite writer either. She had been convicted some five years ago of circulating a confirmed Mary Sue—it was only her attention to historical detail and her insistence that Watson remain the primary sidekick at all times that had saved her from a harsh sentence. That had been her first introduction to the world of plot control; she had joined the PPC in penance after she had finished scrubbing Elrond's dungeon floors with a toothbrush.

If truth be told, Christopher Hunter (nee Cecelia Remington) was only the one who got caught. She had written lots of Mary Sue fiction in her teenage years: crap, every piece of it, never shared with anyone for that reason. The real issue between her and Bianca, Blythe was forced to admit, wasn't so much that Bianca had _imagined_ this farce as that she'd _published_ it.

Would Blythe have done any differently if she had had internet access when she was fourteen? Would she have posted Captain Kittredge or Kinri Kaelin on some Prodigy board to come back and haunt her ten years later?

Young Bianca reached up, and Blythe almost shot her, but Bianca was just adjusting her braces. "Hold still," Blythe snapped. Stupid Sue didn't realize that shooting her was the default plan. She looked too human, that was the problem—if only she'd had long raven-black hair and crystal blue eyes and breasts bigger than her head, then she'd be a _creature_ instead of just a pouty kid and Blythe would have blown her away long ago. But nothing in the manual talked about assassinating your partner.

_Do you look like Prince Hamlet? _she asked herself sternly. _I thought not. Stop soliloquizing and get back to business. You are a probationary assassin with a full charge sheet and a whining, angsting, Bambi-eyed Mary Sue standing right in front of you. Get on with it!_

The fact that she didn't have to pull the trigger herself was no comfort. She couldn't picture herself waiting for Bianca to return, walking back to the office with her, then saying, "I'm going to submit this charge sheet to the Department of Mary Sues now. Enjoy your last two weeks of existence." Putting off the inevitable was no solution.

_I need a plan, that's my problem_, she told herself. _If I have a plan, I can anticipate the consequences. Finishing this mission will be a royal pain, but if I have a plan, I should be able to handle it._ The words _…by myself_… hung unhappily at the end of the sentence.

So. Plan. She would assassinate the Sue. No way around that. Bianca would disappear from S-space, no way around that either; she'd have some explaining to do back at headquarters, but hopefully Bianca would enjoy her time back in the real world and maybe get some actual work done. The other four hundred bit characters on the ship would become confused and befuddled, as they always did when the central character disappeared. Nevertheless, confused and befuddled did not mean comatose.

Would she have to shoot them all? Bianca had been right about that—four hundred non-canon fangirls were too many to pick off one by one. Sooner or later, one of them was bound to shoot back and not miss, or escape somewhere where she couldn't break in. This being Star Trek, destroying the ship was always an option, but Blythe didn't think that the Inruder-Friendly Operating System would be quite so friendly as to let her blow up the ship with a word from some clown in a cargo bay. Even the most hastily-written episodes used passcodes and voice recognition before the self-destruct sequence could be initiated, and every one that she could remember insisted that the commands be delivered from the bridge. And blasting her way onto the bridge would be harder than it should have been, because the bridge was populated entirely by non-canon characters who could see her.

Damn.

There really was only one way, wasn't there?

She turned to Young Bianca, who was picking her nails moodily. "You!" she barked.

"Mmm?" said the Sue.

"I will spare your worthless existence on one condition."

"What's that?" asked the Sue hopefully.

"That you find a way to blow up this ship."


	16. Chapter 14

Tears streamed from Bianca's eyes. She tried to pull herself to a standing position without success. Coughing and choking, she retched over Bashir's shoulder.

In case she had forgotten, though, her chosen lust object was, in fact, a doctor. Dr. Bashir stepped expertly to one side to avoid getting splashed and gently held Bianca's shoulders until they stopped heaving. "Here," he said, swiftly propelling her to an open grate and turning her head toward the gap where fresh air streamed through. "Oxygen. Now breathe."

Drawing in deep lungfuls of smoke-free air, Bianca tried to pull herself together. Strangely enough, the smoke didn't seem to affect Dr. Bashir. And the monster below them, against all logic, seemed to be so stunned at the sudden rescue that it had momentarily gone quiet and stopped spewing slime.

They were standing on the edge of a deck that had been badly cut through. About three feet of ledge jutted out over the monster pit, terminating in a section of mismatched metal gratings. There appeared to be no accessible exit, or for that matter, entrance. How on earth had Bashir gotten over here?

Her analysis of the topography was interrupted by her savior's gentle voice. "Aren't you going to ask me why I'm here?"

Bianca turned to face Julian. His eyes were lovely and dark, and every feature of his sweet face was focused on her. She realized that he has still holding her in his arms and felt herself start to blush. This was what it had all been leading up to, wasn't it? The supreme moment. Well, it certainly didn't feel very supreme. Bianca looked into the singleminded gaze of a decorated officer ten years her senior and blushed for another reason.

"I know why you're here," she forced herself to say. "You're here because I deliberately put myself in danger and forced you to rescue me."

Bashir looked confused… and hurt. Bianca remembered that the doctor had just pulled her out of a ravening monster's grasp and added guiltily, "I'm sorry. And thank you for saving my life. You shouldn't have had to."

Julian focused his eyes on hers. "You know," he said at last. "I'm not sure you're who I was expecting at all."

"No," said Bianca firmly. "I'm not. You're looking for Mary Sue, my little lookalike, who has been pulling your strings and making you into her Prince Charming. Well, I'm not her and you're not him, so let's stop this monkey business."

Bashir narrowed his eyes, and for a moment, Bianca was sure her words were taking effect. But un-Suing a smitten hero was harder than it looked, and at that moment, the clamor of shouting fangirls reached their ears. Bianca realized that the author had only allotted a certain amount of time for amorous interchange before restarting the adventure: they were, in fact, clearly visible to the several hundred grabby fans who had come to watch her die, and this process was about to recommence. Her last words seemed to sink into the doctor's ears without reaching his brain. "No," he said, turning from her to look at the hundreds of screeching harpies above them, "but I can still rescue you!"

Before Bianca could object, Julian snatched up the rope that had once looped around Bianca's legs and threw it upwards to lasso over some unseen object. He seized Bianca's waist in one arm and began to climb with the other. Her cry of, "What do you think you're doing, you crazy—?" died in her throat as she looked down.

_Oh god. Oh god._

Thirty feet of steaming monster pit swung dizzily below them. Bianca's stomach gave an almighty lurch. Her fear of heights and her fear of fire took over her muscles, and she clung to Dr. Bashir like a drowning rat. The Balzac snapped at them like a little dog watching a squirrel—she reminded herself that _that_ particular danger was supposed to be over and endeavored to make herself believe it. She looked up as an alternative, but the space-warping spectacle of a man climbing one-handed up a rope made her brain churn even more than her stomach. Eyes closed tight against Bashir's shoulder, she tried to list every law of physics they were currently violating, starting with the fact that she now appeared to weigh twenty pounds. She gave up after the first ten points and tried to forget them as quickly as possible, lest S-space suddenly agree with her and they both fall to their deaths.

_This is rescue,_ she told herself firmly. _This was supposed to be the fun part. Right? Fifty feet in the air above a fire trying not to wet your pants?_

A phaser beam flashed past her, and Bianca's eyes snapped open. Yes, in fact, the guards above them were armed—why had it taken them this long to remember this fact? Julian swung them towards the nearest ledge; Bianca tried to will into existence billions of subatomic particles moving in the opposite direction (conservation of momentum, pT equals 0, never mind). Bashir, untroubled by such concerns, landed with the grace of a figure skater, and began shooting back. Against all logic, he managed to do all of this with one arm still protectively around Bianca's waist.

Nauseous and deeply embarrassed, Bianca ducked out of his embrace and took cover behind a broken bulkhead to rummage for a weapon. The Night Ship guards had taken her phaser and most of her equipment; none of the small PPC devices that they had missed were suited to the purpose. She looked out at the battle with a critical eye and noticed that neither the guards nor Dr. Bashir were shooting to hit. They were just firing phasers into the air for the look of the thing. Apparently Captain Sonia had also noticed this (though in her badly-written point of view, she probably was deciding that the fugitives were too far away to hit) and was shouting, "Down to the lower levels! Get the guards!"

"Bashir!" shouted Bianca over the din. "What are you doing? How do you propose to get us out of here?"

"I don't know!" Bashir shouted back. "I'm just rescuing you!"

"How did you get in here? Can we get out that way?"

Now Bashir really did stop to think. A cautionary phaser beam zapped past his hair; he shot a warning in the direction it had come from, and ducked behind the bulkhead with Bianca.

"You know," he said at last, "I don't know."

"You don't know?" repeated Bianca, surprised.

"No," reiterated Bashir, in the same normal tones—a refreshing change from his earlier besotted dialogue. "It's a complete blank. I remember deciding to rescue you, and then I was here. I can't remember how I got here or where I got this phaser from. It's as if it never happened."

Bianca sighed in irritation. _ Who's fault was this?_ she reminded herself. "Try to remember," she pressed him. "Because there are four hundred people up there, and I don't think we're getting out that way."

"What on earth was I doing back there?" the doctor asked her.

"Being heroic," Bianca told him flatly. "But not very useful. Think… do you have any clue how you got here?"

Bashir considered. "I think," he said at last, "I jumped down some kind of Jeffries tube and broke through the plating on one of the lower decks. It certainly involved a long drop of some sort. I could get down it fairly easily, but we couldn't get back up."

"Well," said Bianca, through the next blast of phaser fire, "This is a lower deck, and this has plating."

Without needing to be told, Bashir reset his phaser and turned to the back of the bulkhead. "Cover me," he ordered Bianca, and began cutting through the metal plating that sealed off the rest of the deck.

"With what?" asked the agent plaintively. "And from what? Haven't you noticed those guys upstairs are too incompetent to actually hit us? The real danger is that the captain is sending some guards to the lower decks, and they'll be waiting for us if we take too long."

"Right," said Bashir. "Now stand back, this plate's about to fall."

In their current predicament, there wasn't much "back" to stand, at least not without falling into the claws of a strangely docile Balzac. Bianca ducked around the bulkhead and grabbed a metal beam; Bashir grunted approval, and as he finished cutting a gap wide enough to enter, Bianca raised the bar and staved the wall plating inwards. The red-hot edged piece fell harmlessly into the corridor beyond.

Distantly, she could hear the "Hoi! Hoi! Hoi!" of the fangirls, and wondered how slowly they must be moving if they still hadn't gotten their weapons and headed out the door. Didn't she have any sense of timing at all when she was fourteen? "Wait!" hissed Bianca, as Bashir stepped forward. "Let me borrow that phaser for a minute!"

_They won't hit you. They won't hit you,_ she repeated to herself as she stepped out from under cover. _You're not scheduled to be stunned in this scene. So take your time and do it right. Despite the phaser beams streaming—ack!—past your nose._

Leaving the phaser on its highest setting, Bianca carefully sighted from her position—about three decks below the main level—to the double doors of the room. She couldn't hit the doors themselves, not from this angle, but she could hit the impressive Gothic beams just above them. Her first two shots missed, but on her third she managed to bring down one enormous stone chunk, blocking all access to the exit. The fangirls above screamed and scattered.

"What was that for?" inquired Bashir, as they fled into the empty deck beyond the steaming hole.

"Mission control," replied Agent Bianca. "All their ranking officers are in that room, and almost everyone else on the ship. It'll make my job a lot easier if they stay trapped in that room for the rest of the story."

Bashir wrinkled his nose. "Can't they just signal the bridge crew to beam them out?"

Bianca thought about this. "They can," she said at last, "but I don't think they'll remember that they can. They're not experienced Star Trek characters, and right now they're more in Gothic fire-and-brimstone mode." This last bit came out before she could censor it.

Bashir stopped by another Jeffries tube and gestured upwards. "If, as you say, guards are coming, we'd best get off this deck." Acknowledging this, Bianca removed the entrance hatch and obediently climbed upward. With the immediate danger gone, she was now acutely aware of her lust object ascending a few inches behind her with his face in her derriere. She felt self-conscious and sweaty.

"I'm all right!" she said irritably, as Bashir stretched to help her up. "I don't need you to give me a boost!"

"I'm sorry," said Julian irritably. "I didn't mean… Do you have any idea where we are?"

Bianca looked around. It was a corridor. There were pipes and tubes and things. There was no turbolift or landmark in sight. She shook her head.

"How were you proposing to get us out of here?" Bashir inquired.

"Eventually, we'll take the same shuttle you were in before," Bianca assured him. "But I don't know how to get to the shuttle bay from here, and I don't remember if—"

"That's them!" came a shout from the end of the hall.

…_if there has to be another action sequence between now and then,_ Bianca finished to herself. _ Is this really necessary?_

"Run!" shouted Julian, grabbing her hand and making a dash for nearest corner. Placing her firmly behind him, he hurriedly reset his phaser and targeted their pursuers. Now he was shooting to hit, and he managed to pick off three of the foremost guards, forcing the rest to flatten themselves against the walls before trying to come any closer.

"Door!" pointed Bianca, and they raced up the corridor towards the only door in sight. The guards, seeing no more immediate fire, took up the chase. Bashir fired behind him as they ran, and as the door closed behind Bianca, he fired again at the latching mechanism. The phaser's weak beam succeeded in sealing the door, but ended in a sad little chirping noise that boded no good.

"No!" exclaimed Bianca. "That's not supposed to happen! Try it again!"

Bashir, harboring the same suspicion, tried again. The weapon made another sad little sound and produced nothing. "Drained," said the doctor flatly. "Completely drained." The thumping of the guards outside grew louder.

"This is not supposed to happen!" hissed Bianca. "I don't remember much about this part, but I'm sure you were supposed to have a weapon! Why did you…" She stopped, deciding not to criticize Dr. Bashir for firing all those needless shots at the rampaging fangirls; after all, he had been under the influence of her own bad writing at the time, and it had been her idea, not his, to then use the small weapon to cut through a large bulkhead. She finished instead with the less confrontational, "Now what do we do?"

"We move!" Bashir replied. Together they fled across the room, which appeared to be engineering maintenance, and disappeared through the next door.


	17. Chapter 15

"Problem," said Mary Sue.

"Fix it," retorted Blythe.

Young Bianca rolled her eyes. It was hard enough finding a way to destroy an entire starship (said the Sue's entire stance) without having some Professor Snape breathing down your neck. "It's not that simple," she tried to explain. "I've broken into the main computer and found the self-destruct sequence—"

"Never underestimate the power of Mary Sue!" Blythe snorted.

Young Bianca glared back and continued, "I've even keyed it in to work from a remote location. But now it wants Captain Banaszak's authorization code, and I have no idea what that is. And even if I did, the command sequence is dovetailed with another file called 'Bridge Alert,' so it will probably count down from the bridge and not from here. Anyone on the bridge will probably be able to see it and shut it down as fast as I can punch it in. _And_ they'll be able to trace the command source down to this room, so they'll know where we are."

"So," said Blythe brusquely. "Work around it."

Young Bianca slammed her hands down on the console. "What do you want from me?" she spluttered. "I don't know what I'm doing! I'm not an officer on this ship—I'm not even a computer engineer! My original idea was to get off this ship, not destroy it. The computer helped me find the command file, but it's not going to just hand me the password!"

Blythe drummed her fingers thoughtfully on the underside of her phaser barrel. The Sue did have a point: blowing up the ship had not been part of the original story, so there was no reason to have a password floating around characters' heads. Where were they to go from here?

"Are you sure you don't know the password?" Blythe essayed. "Think. Her birthday? Her social security number? _Swordfish_ or _April Moon_ or _I Luv Julie _or something simple like that? If you were Captain Banaszak, what would you choose?"

"I don't know!" Young Bianca wailed.

Blythe considered further. There had to be a way out of this. There just had to be. No PPC agent had ever gotten this far only to be stopped by a lack of information. And she was, after all, an intelligence agent.

"Bianca."

"Yes?"

"This story was written by you," Blythe began. Young Bianca shook her head blankly, and Blythe restarted her theory from a different angle. "This story was written by Bianca Reese, aged fourteen. You are Bianca Reese, aged fourteen. The author created you to be an exact copy of herself: thoughts, memories, experiences, everything. You may not be consciously aware of it, but everything in this universe was created by you, for your benefit.

"Captain Banaszak, that one-dimensional caricature of your high school classmate, did not create this password. You did! Your author, an exact replica of you, only… you know, real… chose a password that she thought Sonia Banaszak should have. If you guess at what password a captain should have for destroying her own ship, you'll guess right. Because it was your idea all along, and presumably you—I mean, the author—went with her first impulse. Do you understand?"

Mary Sue chewed her lower lip. She didn't nod, but she didn't shake her head, either. She gave Blythe a worried look.

"Take a guess!" Blythe urged her. "Be logical. If you were writing a code for a self-destruct sequence, what would it be?"

Young Bianca considered this for a few seconds. "I've got it," she announced suddenly. "I know what the code is."

Blythe smiled, then remembered that she shouldn't. "Are you sure?"

"It's the only code I know."


	18. Chapter 16

"None of this is real, is it?"

Bianca turned towards Dr. Bashir as the full weight of his question hit her in the face. "What did you say?"

"None of this—" his gesture encompassed the duct where they were crouching, and below them, the upper engineering bay—"is real. It's a program of some sort. A story matrix. Some sort of holosuite gone awry."

Bianca stared at him, thunderstruck. Her expression appeared to confirm his theory, so he went on, "That's what you've been talking about all this time: you and that other agent and that girl who tried to rescue me. This… Mary Sue, or whatever her name is. Talking about 'S-space' and what's 'supposed to happen.' This isn't reality… it's some kind of program gone wrong. Isn't it?"

The question, "How did you know?" was on Bianca's lips, but she caught herself in time. He'd just _said_ how he'd known, hadn't he? They had been gabbing away all this time, she and Blythe, and he had been present for most of it. And hadn't she made a crack about Star Trek characters just a few minutes ago? Bianca swallowed hard and considered how phenomenally smart Julian Bashir was, when he wasn't being rescued in her childish fantasies.

"And you wrote the program." There. He'd figured it out at last. Bianca hung her head in shame.

"I did," she confessed, forcing herself to look him full in the face. "I did, six years ago. And I'm sorry. I never meant for it to come to this. It was just supposed to be a little bit of fun. I never meant for you to actually be abducted and forced to enact it. But the story was circulated and the damage was done, so here I am, six years later, trying to get rid of the character I created."

Perhaps it would have been better if he'd slapped her. If he'd said, "You bitch! Look what you've done!" But no, that was her mind talking again, her melodramatic version of what she wanted him to be. This was the real Dr. Bashir next to her, and all he did was nod and say, "Mary Sue. The character you created to…"

He trailed off, and Bianca finished the sentence so he wouldn't have to. "…Rescue you." The words came out in a croak.

Bashir considered for a long moment. Bianca couldn't meet his eyes anymore. "That's why the time seems disjointed," he said at last. "That's why your face keeps coming into my mind and I can't think straight. I do things I don't understand and can't remember. I do things that I shouldn't be able to do. And for some reason, they succeed. Because that's the way the story is supposed to go."

Bianca nodded. "It wasn't designed to make sense. It was designed to be…"

"…exciting," Bashir supplied.

Bianca looked at him in surprise. "That's what holosuite programs are for," Bashir pointed out. "Though I've never known one that could affect space and time like this one."

Bianca suddenly remembered the episode where Garak had broken into Bashir's holosuite program and spent the entire hour making fun of his friend's fantasy. Of all the characters in the multiverse, Julian actually might understand what it was like to have your personal fantasies enacted in public for everyone to scrutinize. James Bond, wasn't it, that he had been playing at? "Mary Sue is a lot of fun to be," said Bianca at last. "She's extremely powerful, and she makes everything and everyone present revolve around her for as long as she's around. She forces people to fill roles… to be the characters she thinks they ought to be. You don't see the damage she does until afterward."

"And this Mary Sue brought me here to be her hero," Bashir concluded.

"Yes," Bianca agreed.

"Well, what are we waiting for?"

Silence filled the space between them, as Bianca replayed that last remark over and over in her mind. A roguish twinkle was dancing in the doctor's eyes. "I'm sorry," Bianca stammered, "I don't understand. What do you mean, _what are we waiting for?_"

"Well," grinned Bashir. "Do you know where we are?"

"No," Bianca replied honestly.

"Do you have any idea how to get from here to the shuttle bay without being seen by the guards?" he continued.

"Or by all those engineers down there?" she countered darkly. "Not the slightest. And certainly not without a working phaser."

"Or how we're going to get away from this ship without being chased and locked with a tractor beam, exactly as we did the last time?"

Bianca shook her head. "By that point, they'll have stopped chasing us. As I said, the story was not designed to make sense."

"But in your story matrix, Dr. Bashir and Mary Sue did escape successfully at that point?"

"Yeah. Go fig."

Bashir's expression flickered at the unfamiliar idiom, but he refused to be distracted from the thrust of his argument. "So in fact, the most reliable way to get us out of danger might be to become the hero that Mary Sue expects me to be?"

"What?!" choked Bianca. "No! You can't be serious!"

Julian shrugged good-naturedly. "We can't stay up here forever. Sooner or later, someone is going to notice us, and even if they don't, we'll still be trapped on a hostile vessel without any means of communication. You need to find this Mary Sue and I need to get out of this matrix and back into normal space. The best way for both of us might be to play into her hands." To Bianca's gagging noise, he responded, "You said it yourself: the hero is supposed to escape successfully, no matter what he faces along the way."

"Doctor Bashir!" Bianca begged. "You can't really mean this. Don't you remember what it was like to be under her influence? You get these uncontrollable urges to sing 21st century pop ballads and whine about your troubled childhood. You're inexplicably moved to share all your darkest secrets and forswear all the other women you've ever loved. You lose your self-awareness, you lose your self-respect… your higher mental functions are replaced by this huge poster that says _I Heart __Mary Sue!_ This whole mission was supposed to release you from that mess, not hurl you back into it!"

"I remember," Bashir assured her. "And no, I can't say I enjoyed it at all. But if it's the only way to get us out of here…"

"Julian!" The name broke from her lips, and she corrected herself. "Dr. Bashir! Sir! You don't have to do this for me!"

"I'm not doing it for you!" Bashir shot back. "I'm doing it for _me_." Now he really was grinning wickedly. "What, you don't think I can play the hero if I have to?"

Bianca forced herself to smile back. "No, sir," she mumbled. "I'm sure you're… very talented in that regard." Then her brain took over and she wailed, "But this is so humiliating! For you, I mean!"

Bashir shrugged again. "I'd rather be humiliated than dead!"


	19. Chapter 17

"Right!" barked Blythe, clapping her hands briskly. "Let's get on with it. Key in a time delay from that shuttlecraft console and let's get moving!"

"Not so fast," said Mary Sue. She turned around to face Blythe, her face a chiseled carving of determination. Blythe drew herself up to her full height and stopped twiddling her phaser. That look was trouble if she ever saw it.

"Promise me," demanded the Sue. "_Promise me_ that whatever happens, whatever you happens here, you'll see Dr. Bashir safely back."

"Oh for pity's sake!" groaned Blythe. "Why do you think I'm here, you throwback?"

"Promise me!" Bianca glared.

Blythe sighed in aggravation. _This is why Mary Sues are meant to be assassinated, not negotiated with!_ she told herself. Nevertheless, there was no point in arguing over this.

"You have my word," she assured Young Bianca. "The word of a PPC agent who cares far more for the wellbeing of this character than you do. I swear by the canon, by my commission, by my f-list, and by mine own name to faithfully care for Julian Bashir and see him safely back to Deep Space Nine: unharmed, unbrainwashed, and unkissed by ravening fangirls."

The Sue exhaled theatrically, and turned back to the console. Blythe stiffened and glared at the Sue apprehensively. _That was too easy,_ Bianca knew._ What about you? You're not going to make me promise not to hurt__ you?_ It was the crux of the deal, of course. But even Blythe didn't entirely trust herself to keep this Sue around forever after she had helped eliminate the others, and if she couldn't trust herself, why should this bint?

The Sue appeared to read her thoughts, though from where she was standing, Blythe couldn't see her expression. "As long as Dr. Bashir gets out safely," Mary Sue whispered, "it doesn't matter what happens to me. I'm expendable. He's not."

"Wow!" Blythe grinned. "Now there's a right answer if I ever heard one!"


	20. Chapter 18

Bashir tried to recreate that feeling of pink singlemindedness. That rush of adrenaline that enabled him to do anything without regard for conventions or consequences. _Think hero,_ he told himself. _Champion. Superman. You'll throw away your weapon, slip past the guards without it, kiss the girl, and be off into the stars before they even know you're gone. You just have to believe you can do it. Live the life you've always wanted to live._

Below them, the engineers were changing shifts. Now would be a perfect time to move. _Take advantage of the motion, of the confusion. Get out before they know it's you._ He tensed his limbs for a spring. It never happened. Jumping two decks into an engine room full of people was suicide, and nothing he could tell himself would change that.

--

"Whatever you're doing to me," said Dr. Bashir at last, "stop it."

"Who, me?" Bianca countered.

"Whenever I'm talking with you or interacting with you, either of you, I can suddenly think straight. I look at you, and I see just a woman. I need to see _her_," Bashir explained. "I need to feel the way she made me feel, or I'm never going to be able to get us out of here."

"Erm," mumbled Bianca, feeling strangely inadequate. "How exactly did she make you feel?"

The _look_ Bashir gave her now was almost more painful than the doe-eyed stare he had fixed on her when he had pulled her out of the Balzac pit. "You wrote this program," he reminded her mercilessly. "You know how it's supposed to work."

It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. "You want me to say the lines," Bianca whimpered in horror. "You actually want me to say those appalling lines that I came to wipe out of existence."

"I didn't bring us here," the doctor reminded her playfully. "You did. " Now he was teasing her. "Your brought me across time and space to rescue me from peril!" _By god,_ thought Bianca in the depths of her mortification, _he's really enjoying this, isn't he?_

"Well?" he continued, the impish grin spreading across his face again. "Here I am. Julian Bashir, at your service, ready to catch a beautiful woman in my arms and save her from whatever danger is stalking us both." Bianca groaned aloud. It was like your third grade teacher reading your note in front of the class. Only this class was taking place in the seventh circle of hell, and you had to read the note aloud yourself with Starfleet's sexiest salutatorian laughing at you. He was laughing at her now, a stifled snicker at the extent of her distress.

"Come on!" His tone changed to become winning and seductive. "You set up all this to make me care. Well, here I am! And I care very much…!" His hand reached out and caressed Bianca's waist. Bianca's stomach gave a lurch and she felt herself go hot to the core. _Oh god, no. Not here. Not like this. _ She tried to pull away from him, but Julian was relentless. "So, aren't you at least going to enjoy it?"

Right.

She drew Bashir's caressing arm fiercely around her and pulled his other arm across her shoulder. His chin smacked her cranium and her left ear ended up in his armpit, but Bianca pressed on. Trying to drown out the thumping of her heart, she managed to stammer, "You saved my life and I am eternally grateful. But oh no, we're trapped up here, what are we going to do."

The last sentence was missing its question mark. She realized as she said it that she sounded like a cheerleader parked in Lovers' Lane and was too busy trying to reword the doomed phrases to worry about the intonation. "Oh, I could stay here for a good deal longer trapped like this with you," purred Bashir. _Oh god,_ thought Bianca, _he heard it, too. If he says that we'll have to find a way to pass the time, I _will_ jump to my death._ But no, he was running his fingers through her hair in a smooth, appreciative movement.

"You're good at this!" she blurted out, then cursed herself for a pathetic scarlet wannabe. Of all the guys in the multiverse, why did she have to sound like such an idiot in front of this one? But now the shining look had returned to Bashir's eyes and she knew how to end this travesty gracefully. _If anyone at headquarters sees this, I will _die. She spun around to face him and gave him the most swaggering, seductive look she could deliver.

"So, Doctor… Bond, isn't it?" she trilled, in her best impression of a sexy Russian spy.

"Bashir," finished her companion elegantly. "Julian Bashir."

Bianca exhaled with a pained sigh. The deed was done. A tiny part of her wondered if the doctor was still only playing his game, but now he was pulling out his useless phaser and drawing her close to his side.

"Now," said Julian Bashir, "Let's get out of here."


	21. Chapter 19

There was some sort of hullaballoo going on upstairs with the Deep Space Nine character, but it didn't much interest Surindar. He had never really gotten into that show. He finished his hourly check of the propulsion systems and ordered a routine system scan. Spending several months as an engineering sublieutenant was not too steep a price to pay for being able to show Dr. Crusher the real Picard maneuver. Say what you will about the wait, they had a nice computer system for him to play with.

Somewhere above his head, a panel clanked, and he looked up.

--

_I'm going to wake up soon, but no!  
First I'm going to kiss some part of you.  
Into the flames we'll fall and then  
You'll see what I can do for you!_

_I've got this down…_

Bashir scaled down the pipes which flowed from below the ducts down onto the lower level of the engineering deck. Above him, the other agent lost her balance and slipped; he caught her effortlessly and set her on her feet, feeling the warmth of her body pressed against his. The music in his head caught fire and blazed; he struggled not to think against its beat.

_I know I'll find another way  
There's so much more to know  
Tell me I'll die another day,  
It's not my time to go!_

All around them, voices were coming into focus. "Hey, what going on?" "Isn't that Bashir? What's he doing here?" "Hey, you guys, what do you think you're doing?" "Stop!" They were sensible and unforced, and he tried to pretend they were not. It would have been better if they had been brandishing weapons instead of equipment requisitions.

_To fall in love with a beautiful stranger…_

Now some of the engineers were starting to pull out phasers. Gratefully, Bashir spun around to face them. He knew what to do now.

_I'm going to break the cycle.  
I'm going to shake up the system.  
I'm going to destroy my ego…. yes, that's it.  
Tomorrow never dies, and so_

He flung his own useless weapon at a surprised lieutenant. The technician, completely taken aback, dropped his own as he tried to catch what had been thrown at him. With reflexes he never knew he possessed, Bashir dived for the tumbling phaser and caught it as it hit the floor.

_I'm going to embrace the clichés.  
I'm going to suspend my senses now.  
I've got to see with new eyes.  
I've got to live and let die…_

Now the guards were here, and their words fed effortlessly into the throbbing rhythm. "It's them! They're here! Get them!" That was better. He caught up the beautiful agent in his arms—desperately trying to ignore the fact that she was not particularly attractive—and swung her up onto the balcony, forcing himself not to measure the height or the strength of his arms. He ducked behind a pillar to shield himself from the phaser fire and scanned the room for a possible escape.

_For your eyes only is this game  
I see your golden eyes through the flames  
I know your heart, you know my name, and so  
You know that I have license to—_

He whirled around and fired at the guards encircling them. He noticed for the first time that a number of the guards were men, and this made him feel safer for some reason. Phaser beams crisscrossed through the air. Again and again his shots scattered his would-be captors, and again they regrouped and recouped for another assault.

A stray beam lanced through the ceiling, bringing down plating and wires in a hiss of smoke. The guards sprang aside to avoid the crackling cables, but Bashir, with a serpent's grace, leapt over the live ends and began to climb upwards. More phaser fire sizzled past his face as his lovely partner extended a hand to pull him up. No shots could touch him as he climbed, no danger could destroy his perfect cool, but no sooner had the agent caught him by the shoulder and pulled him upwards than both their footings gave way, and he collapsed under the railing, falling over her supple body as they rolled to the floor.

_For every sin, I'll have to pay  
In this risky game we've come to play.  
The world is not enough, I know.  
But it's not my time to go._

She turned her face away before he could kiss her. He pulled her to her feet, and she demanded, "How do we get out of here?"

Below them, guards and engineers sighted up at them with murderous eyes. Already, many of them were ascending the lower rungs of the ladders that would bring them up to the circle where Bashir and his partner were trapped. Instinct took hold of Bashir's arms, and he grabbed the cable as if to swing from it. His beautiful counterpart was at his side in an instant, recognizing where his mind was taking him.

Behind them, the guards closed in. In front of them, the warp core glowed with an eerie blue light. A sheer drop extended down that way.

_I think I see another way…  
Forget the rules and just flow with me.  
I swear I'll die another day,  
It's not my time to—_

He couldn't help it. He looked.

"My god," breathed Dr. Bashir. "What on earth is that?"

In the heart of the warp core was _something_. A break, a fissure, an impossible glimpse of something invisible and unbearable. This was the source of the eye-watering glow, this anomaly whose light spun so painfully he could not bear to look at it. As the vertigo set in, he tried to remember where he had seen this watery dark light before. His mind rebelled in agony, and he looked away.

The agent was also looking away, one side of her face cradled in a trembling hand. But as the guards closed in, she threw up her head with a look of determination Bashir had never seen before.

"Bashir! _Jump!_"

--

They landed on their feet on the loading deck just outside the main shuttle bay. The music was gone now, and Bashir felt weak and hung over. His whole body ached as if it had been stretched out of shape; the searing light of the _thing_ they had fallen through seemed permanently etched onto the back of his eyeballs. He leaned against a wall and took several deep breaths.

Agent Bianca's worried eyes were on his face, but this did nothing for his heartbeat or his imagination. Good. "I'll be all right," he assured her. "Just give me a moment." She looked away respectfully, and he was grateful for the reprieve.

"What on earth was that?" he asked her at last, when the world had stopped spinning around his head. "I think I've seen it elsewhere on this ship, but every time I try to think about it, it seems impossible and I have to stop."

Bianca smiled, in spite of herself. She'd known what the fissure was as soon as they laid eyes on it. A dark spinning light, beautiful and mind-altering and utterly impossible.

"A plot hole," she told him sweetly. "Don't let it get to you."


	22. Chapter 20

Blythe sauntered out from behind the shuttle, doing her best impression of Harrison Ford. "What took you so long?"

"Sorry!" Bianca shot back. "We had to stop at all of the seven levels of hell on our way down."

"How was the trial?" Blythe smirked. "Angst much?"

"You knew!" Bianca was sure of it. "You did this on purpose, just to embarrass the … oh no!" she trailed off. A new thought had occurred to her. "The things I said up there, the changes I made… oh my god! Did those turn up in the actual story?"

Blythe smiled like a wolf. "What, _this_ story right here?" She still had the printout in her hand. "_Rrraw!_" She made a cat noise and waggled her eyebrows. "Geez, Reese, I never knew you had it in you!"

Bianca let out a Klingon death howl and buried her face in the side of the shuttlecraft. "I didn't mean to throw up on him," she wailed from under her hands, "but I was half-poisoned by that bloody smoke! And the song was _not_ my idea! Double-07 here really did most of the work, because I was incredibly rattled and I have no experience being a Bond girl!"

"Oh, come on!" needled Julian with mock encouragement. "You weren't _that_ bad."

"Oh you weren't, were you?" cooed Blythe, jumping on that last remark with all twenty claws. Bianca let out another moan. "What were you guys doing up there that you don't want me reading about?"

"Blythe Grimm, you are the most—" Bianca began, before realizing the significance of her partner's last jibe. For all her catty remarks, Blythe hadn't actually answered her original question, nor had she referred specifically to any one of Bianca's misadventures. How on earth could Blythe's changes affect a packet that they had printed to paper several hours earlier? Bianca shot Blythe a glare that should have killed cows at a hundred paces and said sourly, "So! Mission…?"

Blythe forced herself to get back to business. "Mary Sue here has agreed to key in a destruct code once we're safely away from the ship, for which favor I have agreed not to reduce her to her component molecules. Our only issues are the question of timing and how to pull the whole thing off without anyone on the bridge noticing and trying to stop us."

"If I understand rightly, the bridge should be almost completely deserted," cut in Bashir. "Since Agent—" He looked towards Agent Bianca and fumbled for a few moments.

"Bianca," said the Sue softly.

"—since Agent Bianca sealed most of the senior staff in that arena as we were leaving it."

"Can't they just beam out and—" Blythe began.

"Well, if you get on the communication system and _tell them_, maybe they will!" snapped Agent Bianca irritably. "But we're pretty much at the end of the story here, and they're not scheduled to have any higher brain functions at this point. Timing shouldn't be a problem either, since this whole deck is scheduled to be _Mark of Gideon_ until we make our escape."

Blythe understood her partner's reference to an artificially empty starship and snorted, "Wow, the Maginot line of Mary Sue. Look, they just tried to fly a shuttle to freedom, so now let's guard all the transporter rooms really carefully and leave the shuttle deck completely deserted."

"You never knew my name," the Sue was wistfully saying to Dr. Bashir.

"You never told me," Bashir replied to her.

"Back off!" thundered Bianca. "If you so much as breathe one Mentos-scented atom of your precious Sue breath on him, I swear I will personally lynch you like a Southern mob and feed your dead body to Nazi guard dogs!"

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" The strength of feeling seemed to disturb Bashir more than Young Bianca. "She wasn't doing anything to me."

"Yet!" Agent Bianca shot back. "Down, Princess! Heel. Stay."

"If you three have quite finished your little soap opera?" Agent Blythe was standing at the door of the shuttle. "Can we get out of here, please?"

--

The shuttlecraft drifted slowly away from the Night Ship. "I'm still not sure this will work," said Young Bianca with classic Mary Sue self-effacement. "All it takes is one officer on the bridge to override this sequence."

"And you know what?" Agent Bianca patted her counterpart's shoulder. "If that doesn't work, we will find something else that does. You can commandeer their navigation systems from here and fly their ship into a star or something. You can lock their shields down and beam the entire crew into the center of an asteroid. There are millions of things we could do."

Young Bianca looked confused. "Do I know how to commandeer their navigation from here?" she inquired.

Bianca shrugged. "You and Dr. Zimmerman were scheduled to singlehandedly commandeer the bridge of the _Voyager_ in the next episode. Consider it a trial run."

She knew in an instant that she should have kept her mouth shut. Heads turned to look at her from all over the cabin. "_Next_ episode?" growled Blythe. "_Next episode?"_

"NeverwrittendownIswear!" The words spilled over themselves in their haste to be spoken. "This one took so long to write down that I never started on any of the others."

Blythe glared at her partner with deep suspicion. "Dr. Zimmerman," she said at last. "Dude, you have terrible taste in men."

Bianca glanced nervously at Bashir. "Thank you," she mumbled uncomfortably. "Now, can we please blow that thing up and go home?"

Blythe looked towards Young Bianca, who nodded and started tapping buttons. "Excuse me," Dr. Bashir broke in. "But are you planning to destroy the entire ship with everyone still on it?"

"Yes," said Blythe coldly, "that was the plan."

"But there are innocent people aboard!"

Blythe was taken aback. "Are there?"

"You can't just wipe out an entire crew because you don't approve of the mission." Now the Starfleet doctor was talking. Blythe couldn't believe her ears. Did she have to sing it for him?

"Dr. Bashir, this entire organization was created for the sole purpose of passing you around like a ten-dollar—"

"Bianca!" Agent Bianca cut her off before she could finish her sentence. She was talking to the Mary Sue, not to Blythe. "Tell him."

Young Bianca looked at the floor. "Everyone on that ship is a member of the organization," she revealed to him. "All of us signed on for the same reason. They're all biding their time and waiting their turns until their chosen character gets picked up and passed around. Everybody's got some twisted sex fantasy they're waiting to act out with someone, but until your desired character gets brought on board, you take your turn as a technician or navigator to keep the ship running. That's how I was able to change my name and rejoin as one of the guard; I just signed up for someone other than you. Even the captain is scheduled to step down and do guard duty as soon as the Night Ship moves on to the next character. You were only the first."

"And that's why there were going to be more episodes, right?" Bianca prompted her younger counterpart.

The Sue nodded. "Only presumably they'd have known it was me after this."

"So, this ship is planning to go after other people once I've gone?" Bashir turned the discussion back to the original point.

"'Fraid so," Agent Bianca told him.

The doctor considered the situation for a moment longer. "Destroy the ship," he said at last.

--

"This is Founder Bianca Reese of the FanShare Alliance. Initiate self-destruct sequence 1, code 11A."

"This is Agent Blythe Grimm of the PPC. Initiate self-destruct sequence 2, code 11A2B."

"This is Dr. Julian Bashir of Deep Space Nine." Agent Bianca was feeding him his lines. "Initiate self-destruct sequence 3, code 1B2B3."

Young Bianca finished the sequence as Kirk did in the original Star Trek series. "Code 000-destruct-0."

The one minute countdown began. "I can't believe the computer let us do that!" mused Blythe. "I guess the author was more concerned with having three officers speak the parts than ensuring that they actually be officers on the ship."

"I didn't actually know what voice recognition was at that age," Bianca explained. "I mean, I knew, but it didn't occur to me to use it."

"Hello?" snapped Young Bianca. "This is the timing issue I was trying to explain to you before. When this ship explodes, we are going to be vivisected by shrapnel."

"Hit the control panel very decisively," Agent Bianca told her. "Yes, like that. Like you'd normally do. Now look at the keypad under your hand. Right under your wrist, where you're likely to tap it accidentally, is there a small button labeled, 'Schwartz'? Found it? Good. Press it, and it'll flood the fuel tank with liquid Schwartz. We'll be across the galaxy in minutes."

"Oh my god," Blythe groaned. "You've got to be kidding me."

"Well, how the heck else could she and Bashir get out of tractor range so quickly the second time?" Bianca wondered, and Blythe was forced to grin. "I mean, come on. That version had a whole bridge crew, and even then they were able to abscond before anyone realized they had gone. Go on." This to Young Bianca. "Press it."

Young Bianca pressed the button, and in a few seconds, there was a faint thrumming noise, and the stars in front of them stretched and blurred into rainbows of color. From behind them came a faint _boom_.

Blythe and Bianca spoke together. "Sound doesn't travel in space!"

"It doesn't?" repeated Bashir. "Of course it does. I hear sound in space all the time."

The PPC agents glanced at each other uncomfortably. "That's kind of beyond our field of operations," Blythe told him. "We're not responsible for canonical errors."

Confusion etched its signature on the doctor's lined face. He suddenly looked very drained. "Can we return to normal space now?" he asked feebly.


	23. Chapter 21

The ship pulled noiselessly alongside the station. There was a quiet _thunk_ as the portal connected with an airlock, and the hiss of locks being secured.

Dr. Bashir was hovering uncertainly off to one side. "This is your stop," said Agent Bianca, with false cheerfulness. The doctor looked over at her and nodded warily. Together, they moved towards the portal. Blythe felt the rubber band beginning to go lax; their tangled mission was finally concluding, and the comparatively straightforward mess of paperwork and explaining to the Sunflower just what the hell they had thought they were doing was about to begin…

…except that Mary Sue was barring their way. "Oh no," she said softly. "Not quite that easily." And Blythe could have kicked herself when she saw the girl had a phaser leveled at them all, moving it from person to person with a steady hand. Damn. Right. Young Bianca _wasn't_ trustworthy. How could she have let her guard down like that?

Agent Bianca groaned in aggravation. "What do you want now?"

Her counterpart made a half-shrug with her shoulder, not letting the phaser drop an inch. She spoke no words to answer, but grinned like the Cheshire Cat and turned her face towards Dr. Bashir. There was a beat pause.

"Oh, come on!" wailed Agent Bianca impatiently. "Grow up!"

"You know I can't," replied Young Bianca, not taking her eyes from Bashir. "And you know what I want."

Bashir's expression mixed equal parts indulgence and alarm. "What-- ah-- what exactly does she want now?"

Agent Bianca gave him a long-suffering look. "She wants you to kiss her."

Bashir's dark eyes flickered from the woman beside him to the girl training a phaser on his every move. "I see," he said warily, "That's how the story is supposed to end."

Young Bianca looked worn out and depressed, and Blythe would have felt sorry for her if she hadn't opened her mouth in that petulant pout. "This was my story," she whined. "The whole thing's gone wrong, and I haven't gotten to do anything good this whole stupid time. I didn't get to kick anyone's butt, I didn't get to save the hero, there were no gorgeous costumes, no angst, no drama, nothing." She sounded about ten years old, and Blythe suppressed the urge to smack her.

"But," continued the teenager, with a weary sort of determination, "if I get nothing else, I'm going to get my kiss! We're ending this story right if it I have to kill everyone for it."

Dr. Bashir half-raised his hands in a placating gesture. "No one has to get killed," he assured the young author. Now his charming manner was back, and Blythe could see both Biancas react.

He moved slowly forward, and Blythe felt compelled to put in a bid for decency.

"She's fourteen!" the agent warned him.

Young Bianca shot Blythe a vicious glare, but Bashir met Blythe's eyes for a moment, and said in a voice weary and resigned, "I know."

Then, his gentle smile in place, he reached out his arms towards Young Bianca. "A kiss," he said.

The embrace could have been choreographed. It was smooth, emotional, and didn't result in anyone being shot. Julian held her gently, one hand between her shoulder blades and the other cupping the back of her head. Young Bianca wrapped both arms around his back, and leaned upwards. The kiss was close-mouthed, long, and sweet. The room was completely silent but for the sound of the violins.

_Violins,_ Blythe thought in disgust. She recognized the theme from _Romeo and Juliet_, and entertained a momentary hope that the Sue would end the scene by killing herself. It certainly would save everyone else the trouble.

The violins drew the final chord and then fell silent. Dr. Bashir drew back, his eyes locked on the girl's face. "May I leave now?" he asked gently.

Young Bianca nodded wistfully. Bashir gave her an avuncular pat on the back and released his arms, at which point Bianca, a bit reluctantly, released hers as well. She gave him a smile that didn't reach her eyes; with a graceful movement, she stepped sideways and swept into a courtier's low bow, clearing his path to the airlock.

Dr. Bashir strode over to the door, looking very pleased with himself. Blythe's upper lip curled in disgust, and in the privacy of her own mind, she signed him up for a much-needed smacking as well. But Agent Bianca's fingers were already flying across the console, and blessedly, wordlessly, Alexander Siddig's character disappeared onto the station. After a moment, the door hissed shut behind him. It was done.

Blythe turned to congratulate her partner, pulling the remote activator from her pocket as she did so, and then there was a noise.

In Real Life, thought Blythe in mid-motion, that would have been a pen slipping off a desk, or a bug landing on a wall, or a peanut that had been stuck to the ceiling ten years ago coming loose and falling. It could have been any of a million things in Real Life. In S-space, though, it tended not to be.

Blythe turned slowly and carefully. In the center of the room was a man.

He was unattractive man, dressed entirely in black; he had appeared on their ship without word or warning. As far as Blythe was concerned, the man might as well have had the words "fanfic villain" stamped on his forehead with indelible ink. His very presence seemed dark and ominous. Not Black, but... black.

The older Bianca made a slightly strangled whimper.

Behind Blythe, there was a footstep. Blythe wasn't about to be caught off guard a second time, and she whirled around to prevent whatever escape the Sue was about to try and pull off.

Only the girl wasn't trying to run. She was looking at the newcomer with a sad smile, steadily walking forwards, a hand extended.

Suspiciously, Blythe followed Young Bianca's progress across the floor of the ship. The man extended one scrawny arm to her. With his black uniform and black half-cape, he would have cut a dramatic figure had he not the build of a monkey and the face of an abused weasel. As it was, he looked like a live-action roleplayer. Blythe couldn't recognize the insignia on the breast of the uniform, like a pair of lips crossed by small vertical bars.

As Young Bianca and the stranger touched hands, he pulled her into his arms, a classic waltzing position. There were no violins this time, but when they started dancing together, it was as smooth as any Mary Sue could wish. Save for their clothes, they looked like the end of a Disney movie, with the princess dancing in the arms of her prince, ignorant of technique or even of gravity.

Only neither of them looked happy.

And the man cast no shadow.

There was an electronic _zap!_ behind her, and Blythe turned to see a blue-edged portal opening up, PPC headquarters clearly visible on the other side. Bianca was standing beside the aperture, Blythe's remote activator in her hand.

"Let's go," said Agent Bianca, her whisper obscenely loud in the otherwise total silence of the shuttlecraft. The footfalls of the dancers made no sound.

The corridor outside was brightly lit, its walls scorched by that flamethrower incident and splattered by what appeared to be finger paint. Blythe took a moment to reorient herself—it always took her a few seconds to readjust after crossing dimensions. Down the way, she could hear someone arguing about Rimmer and Lister and canon inconsistencies, British expletives strung between every other word. Somewhere she could hear someone's radio playing so loudly that it probably came from another floor. It was the cantina song from the original Star Wars.

Blythe was going to find out whose radio that was and stuff their head into a bowl of jello.

She turned to close the portal.

The man was still dancing with the author, who looked very young in his arms. His half-cape was flowing outwards, resisting all natural laws, spiraling rapidly outwards until she couldn't see the Sue anymore, or the ship, or the stars, or—

There was nothing there now, she realized. The story was gone.

She shut the portal and drew a cold breath.

"Who or what was that?" she wondered.

Bianca was still staring into the void where their tangled story had once been.

"The end," she said quietly.


	24. Epilogue

They backed out of the Great Sunflower's office, all but bowing and scraping their gratitude at his extraordinary benevolence. The smiles were riveted to their faces until the door closed between them and the office.

The instant the door closed behind them, the agents turned to one another, confusion and worry on their faces. "Do they mean it?" asked Bianca hopefully. "We did sort of fix things."

Blythe's mouth twisted into a moue, even as she spoke. "This isn't Starfleet," she replied. "In the real world no one promotes you for disobeying orders."

Bianca's smile had a slightly desperate quality to it. "To be fair," she countered, "this isn't the real world precisely."

Her mentor didn't seem the least bit comforted by that thought. "We're toast," she said morosely, with the confidence of the doomed. "I don't know how or why, but we're toast."

"No point in worrying about it," Bianca pointed out.

Blythe sighed. "Tentative optimism is the order of the day?"

"That," agreed Bianca, "and sheer relief that we aren't oliphant toe jam right now. "

They strolled back towards Blythe's desk. "_Suedom_," Blythe read off the top of the mission brief. "Well there's an ominous title if I've ever heard one. Lord of the Rings. Ooh, I've always been curious about Middle Earth canon. They have so many full-time agents over there, I've never gotten a chance to visit."

"Does it say," asked Bianca, with great and careful emphasis, "how many Sues this story features?"

Blythe shook her head. "It's just a copy of someone else's top section," she reported. "I bet there are already a few agents there now and we're just going to join the group. Probably some prancing Princess Fishywishilishiel is getting Lord Elrond's boxers in a twist. I mean, come on!" Blythe waved her hand dismissively. "After what we've just wrapped up, how bad can it be?"


	25. Afterword

**Afterword**

If you search for the original story on which "Cinderella's Song" was based in order to mock it in all its atrociousness, you will not find it anywhere. That is because it was never written down. Why was it never written down, you ask? Because it sucked jumja sticks. Even ten years ago, when I first conceived of it and plotted it out in all its lusty details, I knew it sucked jumja sticks. It was a classic Mary Sue exercise in wish fulfillment, and never was I under the misapprehension that anyone else might want to read it.

Five years ago when I first discovered the PPC, I readily embraced the movement to purge the canon of cavorting Mary Sues. Nevertheless, after sending my agents into a few stories and letting them pump the plot hijackers full of lead, I began to feel somewhat uncomfortable. After all, it was only my good luck that I began writing before the age of widely available internet posting; there but for the grace of God, went I, as far as the Mary Sues were concerned. What would happen if I sent my agents into one of my own early stories? From the Gilbert & Sullivan-esque image of an author obediently trying to cut off her own head an idea began to take shape, and thus "Cinderella's Song" was born.

Young Bianca in this story is drawing upon an antiquated premise: ancient, beautiful, and clichéd. The notion that your dream mate, when offered the opportunity to choose among all of your peers, will ignore everyone else's flashy looks and choose you for your selfless inner nobility is as old as Cinderella herself and older. It can be beautiful when sung beside the fire, but after the fifth or sixth iteration, your stepsisters will ask you to give it a rest, and rightly so.

Mary Sue exists for the purpose of wish fulfillment; her stories are the literary equivalent of a one-person amusement park. They are, as Bianca herself notes, generally a lot more fun to enact yourself than to read about someone else living out. I see very little difference, as far as privacy goes, between imaginary hookups and real ones: neither is designed for public viewing. What gets written to please yourself is one genre. What gets posted/published and shared with complete strangers, perhaps should be another.

But I can't kill Mary Sue off, not if she hasn't actually perpetrated any of the acts she's been dreaming about. She just needs to know her place, that's all. After all, even the best of us are at times inclined to sing Cinderella's song.

**References: Who Was That Mysterious Masked Man?**

Khattam Shud, the mysterious masked man of the final chapter, is the Cultmaster of Bezaban, high chief of the Order of Zipped Lips. He is, as described by his creator Salman Rushdie, "the Arch-Enemy of all stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. Completely finished. Over and done with. Khattam Shud." He is a living, breathing embodiment of The End: the blank page following that last period. His sinister figure features heavily in Rushdie's _Haroun and the Sea of Stories_, a fantasy novel published on the heels of Rushdie's excommunication, forced flight, and concealment from the violence of his countrymen. If you want to read more about the magical moon where stories are made and the young boy who travels there to rescue his father's lost gift of gab—as well as defeating the Cultmaster and helping rescue the ugliest princess ever painted—pick up this amazing work by one of the 20th century's most provocative writers.

Dr. Bashir, of course, is played by Alexander Siddig (nee Siddig El Fadil) on _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_. The episode referenced in chapters 16-19 is "Our Man Bashir" from the show's fourth season. As described in the story, the episode involves Garak, DS9's resident tailor/tinker/soldier/spy, stepping into Julian's James Bond program to see what the fuss is about; as a real intelligence agent, he has quite a lot of cutting remarks to make about the genre. The plot begins when five of the station's senior staff are beamed off an exploding runabout, a problematical task which overloads the station's computer and requires their patterns to be stored in the only location designed for complex humanoid data: the holodeck. An apprehensive Bashir and a contemptuous Garak are then challenged to keep the program running until the engineering staff can repair the computer/transporter hookup. This is somewhat tricky because four of the five officers have been stored as the villains, and are doing their best to kill Bashir stone dead. For readers seeking a more serious adventure, the dashing physician makes quite a good showing in the fifth season opener "By Inferno's Light."

Speaking of James Bond, the song that controls Dr. Bashir's character in chapter 19 is a satire, not a reproduction, of Madonna's "Die Another Day" (Warner Bros. Records, 2002) herein quoted and parodied without permission. It is quite pathetic how many of the original lyrics can be so easily applied to Mary Sue's world without substantial changes. Movie buffs can look for seven James Bond references and one to Austin Powers (same singer, same style, same influence, and same mojo, at least as far as Bashir can see).

A few other sources ought to be cited and thanked at this point. Lord Elrond's Court of Canon Grievances is the property of Miss Camilla Sandman and is further explained in the appendix. The PPC, the Great Sunflower, and the rest of the floral infrastructure were created by Jay and Acacia, and have since been used cooperatively by the few dozen authors of the PPC. About 7 percent of the writing and 100 percent of the revisions are thanks to my partner Lil Bakht, of whose keen eye for character and acute sense of rhythm I am ever in awe. Thank you, Lil—I couldn't have done it without you. A special shout-out goes to actor/director/playwright Dori Robinson for her help with motivation, inner monologue, and further aspects of character development. She didn't mean to teach me those things, but I picked them up anyway. This is what we call collegiality!

--

_If you didn't like what you just read,  
Try to think of it this way instead:  
You just fell asleep and dreamed the whole thing  
The theme was a dream that the Sandman did bring.  
Readers, please don't send me flames.  
Edits can happen without fielding blame.  
I'm not above constructive changes—  
We all rely on reviews from strangers.  
The hour is late, so if I might,  
I'm going to sign off and say good night.  
Respond, "Live long and prosper," if we be friends,  
And geekdom shall restore amends._


	26. Appendix

**Appendix: The Court of Canon Grievance****s**

"Nine is the number of the fellowship, and the number of the fellowship shall be nine!"

Lord Elrond is sick of poncy chicks showing up and claiming to be the tenth member of the fellowship. He is sick of the giggling, the wedgies from the chain-mail bras, the sudden overcompensation for sexism that never really was a problem, the wink-wink nudge-nudge comments around any two characters who happen to share a close friendship. He is sick of the Hall of Firelight being taken over every night by some guitar-slinging indie who needs to tell her life story. Again.

Lord Elrond has sent out the Elves in Black Leather hit squad, whose sexy summons no fan writer can resist. No sooner have you posted your latest fic, than they will appear in your room and drag you off through your computer screen to await trial. Lord Elrond has convened the court of canon grievances to try you all one by one for crimes against literature. And he has no sense of humor (Camilla Sandman, _Unofficial Fanfiction University of Middle Earth_, 2002).

--

Queen Serenity looked down her nose at the sheaf of documents. Ethereal be damned, this was insufferable.

"There is," she said with the authority of an absolute monarch, "no Sailor Sun. There is no Sailor Earth. There is no Sailor of the asteroid belt. Endymion never loved any woman of Earth—I should know! I have no sister; I have no child besides Princess Serenity. We shall not even deign to speak of cousins, or half-siblings. This is all." She calmly took her seat, diaphanous folds settling over the vinyl.

"That," said Professor McGonagall, "sounds very promising."

The final result was a panel of seven: Lord Elrond of Middle Earth, Willow Rosenberg of vampire-ridden Sunnydale, Lord Vetinari for the Discworld, Irene Adler Norton of Sherlock Holmes fame, Queen Serenity for the large-eyed world of anime, Professor Minerva McGonagall for the wizarding community, and the venerable Obi-Wan Kenobi for all other worlds long and and far, far away.

Glorfindel looked at the list and smiled. "I thought the number was nine, and nine was the number." A moment later he was backing slowly out of the room, trying to judge the minimal safe distance. "Lord Elrond used to be a lot more fun," he thought to himself.

The gathering of the council the next day was a study in multi-fandom pandemonium, as several dominant personalities all clashed across the bench. Willow was flirting with Serenity, who was blushing prettily. Either no one had mentioned to the teenage witch that Serenity was 623, or the girl just plain didn't care. Obi-Wan and Vetinari seemed to be having some kind of restrained pissing contest, in which neither actually said anything loud or unpleasant, but it was easily understood by everyone that it was only because they didn't do loud or unpleasant. McGonagall seemed to be trying to coax them into a new topic of conversation, and failure to distract them left her fingering her wand in temptation. Madame Irene was feeding treats to Irene the mini-Balrog. Apparently the sheer number of mispronunciations had been effective enough to give the "darling thing" its wings; Irene was doting on it like a kitten. Lord Elrond sat back in satisfaction. Just like home, he thought.

--

Save Lord Elrond the trouble by recognizing the seven counts of Mary Sue in your own work. To wit:

I. Being beautiful/glamorous beyond the lot of mortals  
II. Being superpowered beyond the lot of heroes  
III. Being tragically misunderstood with tears and angst  
IV. Hogging the action  
V. One-upping the canon characters  
VI. Replacing a canon character  
VII. Glomping a canon character

Count I includes the usual set of violet eyes, heart-shaped face, ash-blond hair, and any other feature that comes with an adjective or hyphen. It also incorporates other glamorous aspects of birth or origin, including being half- anything. Nobody likes Barbie, and nobody believes in a character whose half English landowner, half Japanese Jew, half Klingon, and half Elf. For one, there are too many halves.

Count II insists that all skills take time to master. As Miss Cam's Boromir tells his class, it takes more to be a warrior than grabbing a 60-pound broadsword and deciding you want orc stew for dinner. A lowly ensign should not have enough experience to singlehandedly pilot a thousand-man cruiser—and if he does, don't tell me that he's also a swordsman, French chef, tango dancer, and closet wizard. There is no way in heck that Gary Sue has a PhD in every skill needed for the story to go forward. He has to be a complete klutz at something important. Did I say important? Something _important. _None of this "her cheekbones are too high" or "he can be really moody" business. Important, like important to the plot. But for heavens' sake, don't give the character a soul-wrenching failing that will cause undue self-reproach or…

…Count III: angst, angst, angst! Wow, what a troubled childhood you had. We don't feel sorry for you yet. Neither do we feel as sorry as you do about your critical blunder that you will never forgive yourself for or the noble way you stand up to the oppression of Lionel the Sexist Pig. If you're going to do Greek tragedy, do Greek tragedy. But if you're already committed to doing urban fantasy, then pull yourself together. Ask yourself if the story would work just as well if your character had _not_ been raped by goats at the age of seven. And as for the rest, we all get bawled out by the chief now and then. Give yourself five minutes to beat your chest and cry, "Ashamnu!" and then get over it.

Count IV. Mary Sue does not hold the patent on breaking out of prison cells or singlehandedly holding off enemy hordes. No one wants to watch the canon characters chewing scenery while she saves the day at every turn. If the original characters are that useless, why are they here? This plot ailment, thankfully, has a straightforward cure; though by no means easy, this exercise is also a good treatment for…

Count V, the single most noticeable sign of a Mary or Gary Sue. He always has to be better than the hero at the hero's chosen specialty. He is stronger with the Force than Luke or Anakin Skywalker, a better wizard than Harry Potter or Hermione, a better detective than Mulder or Scully. Everything that Dr. Who can do, Gary Sue can do better, with or without a lot of self-effacing angst (see Count III). The aforementioned cure is simple and effective: _write original fiction!_ Move your characters onto a ship of their own, give them a loyal crew, and let them save their own day. If you want to write the greatest warrior the world has even seen, don't make her Aragorn's underappreciated girl sidekick. Give her a horse of her own and a sword of her own, and send her off to battle the witch-King of Angmar in the Second Age of the World. (This will also reduce the number of times that Aragorn has to be rescued in the course of his work; there are plenty of other hotties for her to rescue who aren't already engaged to Elven princesses.) Go on. Give her the car keys and let her go.

Speaking of underappreciated sidekicks, Count VI is here to protect their rights. Mary Sue has no right to hold any position that is currently being occupied by a canon character. Chief of security on the original starship _Enterprise_ is open; Chief of Security on the Next Generation _Enterprise_ is not. His name is Lieutenant Worf, and his fans will not thank you for firing him to replace him with Brooding McBrood-Brood, your troubled character. If you want Buffy the Vampire Slayer to have another best friend or another man in her life, you'd better have a diamond-cut-diamond explanation of what happened to Willow and Angel; their sabertoothed fans will be sharpening their stakes for your heart after the first three seconds. Best to avoid the whole mess and content yourself with being the new cop on the block rather than being Sherlock Holmes'... you know... _other_ roommate.

Last but certainly not least, Count VII, which covers all aspects of bad taste in romance. If your only reason for writing the story is to get your character involved with a canon character, this will show through a dozen layers of flimsy plot. Get your priorities straight. Plot first, affairs of the heart second. (Or if you're doing a Virginia Woolf consciousness study or character portrait, character development first, affairs of the heart second.) Paint a realistic portrait of the canon character as you go—don't write him/her as a soulful sex god who can do no wrong. And when you're _developing a mutual attraction supported by experience and already-established character preferences_ (are you listening, Joss Whedon?), make sure that your pacing and your subsequent activities are in-character. Don't make Lex Luthor talk like a fifteen-year-old virgin, and don't make Draco Malfoy act like a thirty-five-year-old barfly. If you want an evil rake for Gary Sue to reform into a noble Dark Prince without constraints on his tastes, previous experiences, or sexuality, consider going after… wait for it… _wait for it…_ an original character.

Look, (say the Elves in Black Leather) it all comes down to this. If you're writing a lowly ensign, make her act like the lowly ensign she is. Give her enough self-esteem not to be a complete headcase, but even when she saves the day, know full well that her next stop is back at the front desk checking ID's like every other lowly ensign in the force. Give the canon characters their proper respect. If they're not sexist pigs, don't write them like sexist pigs. If their chain of command works, don't treat it like The Wall whose sole purpose is to oppress you and stifle your brilliant ideas. Don't replace them with your cronies like a Chicago alderman, and don't insist that they worship you unless you've well and truly earned it. And never, ever act like you're better than they are. It's their playground, after all.

And aren't all these rules just meant to be broken?

Sure, says Blythe Grimm, climbing wearily up the dungeon stairs with "Homles" the mini-Balrog snapping playfully at her ankles. Break 'em all you please. Just consider well and truly who your intended audience is. If it's yourself, go for broke. But if it's Penguin Books—or any place else where the rest of us can see it—put yourself in Lord Elrond's place. Remember, his dungeon is waiting, and he has no sense of humor.


End file.
